[pdf] Transport Processes and Unit Operations, Third Edition

University of Minnesota, Source: wikimedia.org

In the chemical and other physical processing industries and the food and biological processing industries, many similarities exist in the manner in which the entering feed materials are modified or processed into final materials of chemical and biological products. We can take these seemingly different chemical, physical, or biological processes and break them down into a series of separate and distinct steps called unit operations. These unit operations are common to all types of diverse process industries.

For examples, the unit operation distillation is used to purify or separate alcohol in the beverage industry and hydrocarbons in the petroleum industry. Drying of grain and other foods is similar to drying of lumber, filtered precipitates, and rayon yarn. The unit operation absoption occurs in absorption of oxygen from air in a fermentation process or in a sewage treatment plant and in absorption of hydrogen gas in a process for liquid hydrogenation of oil. Evaporation of salt solutions in the chemical industry is similar to evaporation of sugar solutions in the food industry. Settling and sedimentation of suspended solids in the sewage and the mining industries are similar. Flow of liquid hydrocarbons in the petroleum refinery and flow of milk in a dairy plant are carried out in a similar fashion.

The unit operations deal mainly with the transfer and change of energy and the transfer and change of materials primarily by physical means but also by physical-chemical means. Classification of unit operations are: fluid flow, heat transfer, Evaporation, drying, distillation, absorption, membrane separation, liquid-liquid extraction, adsorption, liquid-solid leaching, crystallization, mechanical-physical separations. More detail on this e-book:

Link download on google drive: [pdf] Transport Processes and Unit Operations, Third Edition

Share this post