Your first flowsheet

This chapter walks through the Getting Started example: a batch reaction of A and B in heptane to give product C, followed by cake filtration and washing. It is the smallest complete FlowState process and touches every part of the workflow: components, procedures, streams, operations, scheduling and economics.

Open the finished example

Before building it yourself, open the finished model to see where you are heading:

• on the Welcome screen, click Open “Getting Started (A + B → C)”; or
• choose File ▸ Examples Library…, select the Tutorials category and click Open example.

The flowsheet has two unit procedures:

Per batch, about 820 kg of heptane, 50 kg of A and 40 kg of B give about 55.4 kg of C, with 2.5 kg of A and 32.1 kg of B left over. The reactor is the bottleneck, with a cycle time of 10.75 h, which allows 736 batches per year in 7,920 operating hours.

Build it step by step

1. Start a new process

Choose File ▸ New (Ctrl+N). A new process contains the components Water, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide. Open Tasks ▸ Process settings & scheduling… (or the ⏱ Scheduling toolbar button), give the process a title and check that Plant mode is Batch.

2. Register the components

Open Tasks ▸ Pure components… (toolbar ⚛ Components).

1. Click + New custom four times and rename the new rows Heptane, A, B and C.
2. Enter molecular weights: Heptane 100.2, A 150, B 25, C 175.
3. Enter prices in the Price $/kg column (Heptane 1, A 10, B 15) and a Sell $/kg of 200 for C, so the economics have something to work with.

Many common substances (water, solvents, sugars, salts, biomass, proteins) are available from + Add from library instead; see Components, mixtures and property methods.

3. Place the unit procedures

The Unit Procedures library is on the left of the Flowsheet tab.

1. Type reactor in the search box, then drag “In a Reactor” onto the canvas. Alternatively, click the item once to arm it and click on the canvas to place it. A toast confirms Added In a Reactor.
2. Search for plate and place Plate & Frame Filtration to the right of the reactor.

Each procedure gets a tag (P-1, P-2) and an equipment tag, and comes with a default recipe. For “In a Reactor” this is CHARGE-1, HEAT-1, REACT-1, COOL-1, TRANSFER-OUT-1 and CIP-1.

You can also add procedures from the Unit Procedures menu, or by right-clicking the canvas and choosing Add unit procedure.

4. Connect the streams

Ports are the small circles on the procedure icons: inlets on the left, outlets on the right.

• Feeds: drag from an inlet port of the reactor into empty space. This creates a feed stream with a free end. Create three feeds, for heptane, A and B.
• Intermediate stream: drag from the reactor’s outlet port to the filter’s inlet port.
• Products: drag from each filter outlet into empty space to create the cake, filtrate and wash-liquor streams. Add one more feed into the filter for the wash heptane.

Click a stream to edit it in the Inspector on the right:

• rename it (for example Heptane, Cake);
• set its Classification (Raw material, Revenue, Waste…), also available by right-clicking the stream;
• for feeds, enter the Composition (per batch): click + Add component… and type the mass, for example 820 kg of Heptane, 50 kg of A and 40 kg of B.

5. Edit the reactor recipe

Click the reactor. The Inspector shows collapsible sections: Procedure, Scheduling & sharing, Vent & emissions, Equipment, Consumables, labor & hybrid operation, Operations and Results.

In Operations, delete the default operations you do not need with ✕, reorder with ⏶ and ⏷, and use + Add operation to add new ones. For this process the recipe is:

1. Charge heptane, then A, then B. Select each charge operation and pick its feed stream.
2. Stoichiometric Reaction: A + B → C on a mass basis, with an extent of 95 % of the limiting reactant and a process time of 6 h.
3. Transfer Out of the whole contents into the filter feed stream.

Each operation has a Scheduling block with setup time, process time, turnaround, start condition and labour. The tutorial uses 5 min setup and 40, 20 and 30 min for the three charges.

6. Watch it simulate

There is no run button. After each edit FlowState re-solves the process and the status bar shows solved in … ms, the batch time, cycle time and batches per year (and the unit cost and NPV when economics are on). Problems appear in the toolbar status button as ⚠ Warnings or ⛔ Errors. Click it to open the Simulation messages panel, then click a message’s source to jump to the procedure or stream concerned.

7. Look at the results

Use the workspace tabs, or Ctrl+1 … Ctrl+7:

• Streams: the per-batch material balance for every stream, including C in the cake.
• Equipment: reactor and filter sizes, utilisation and purchase cost.
• Schedule: the Gantt chart; R-101 is marked as the bottleneck.
• Economics: capital, operating cost, unit production cost and NPV.
• Environment: waste streams, E-factor and VOC from the heptane.

8. Save

Choose File ▸ Save (Ctrl+S). Processes are saved as .flow files. To share results, export a report with File ▸ Export HTML report… (see Reports and exports).

Where to go next

• Learn what each tab shows in The workspace tabs.
• Browse the 98 procedures in Unit procedures and operations.
• Open a larger model, such as Recombinant Enzyme (Yeast) or one of the published case studies, from the Examples Library.