CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In this paper, we propose a novel hydrogen recovery structure in a cyclohexane productionprocess, arrived at by following a mass exchange heuristic developed in previous works.In the cyclohexane production process considered, we explore the effect of processdesign variables and find the optimal design for a mass exchange between the purgestream and the feed of benzene to the process. We compare our results with a conventionalprocess design lacking hydrogen recovery from the purge, and with a process design whichimplements a conventional membrane recovery system at the optimum setup of thedecision variables. The process with recovery through mass exchange here proposedobtained a respectable 7.12% reduction of hydrogen consumption, resulting in an increaseof the plant Net Annual Income of a 4.24% respect to the conventional process designwithout recovery. These figures are similar to the ones that result from implementing aprocess design with a conventional membrane recovery system. These results highlightthe importance of considering a mass exchange between the process feed and purgestream as an alternative design of the recovery system.