Haber Process: Economic Exothermic Reaction With Nitrogen

In problem one, we were simulating an ammonia production by reacting nitrogen and hydrogen in a reaction called Haber process. Haber process is a very economic exothermic reaction to produce ammonia by reacting nitrogen and hydrogen using a metal catalyst in high pressure and temperature. Nitrogen was obtained from the air and therefore, some argon would be included in this simulation. On the other hand, hydrogen was obtained from the cracking of petroleum. The simulation process started where the feed (mass flow rate = 1256.859 tonne/day) which consisted of 24.75 %nitrogen, 74.25%hydrogen, and 1 %argon) at 25°C and 1 atm entered the compressor (labeled as COMPR 1 in the appendix 1). In COMPR1, the feed was being compressed to a pressure of 300 atm. This compressed feed (labeled as …show more content…
The resulting stream, RFAC entered the RSTOIC (stoichiometric reactor), which reacted the nitrogen and hydrogen to produce ammonia at 400°C and 300 atm, leaving the argon unreacted according to the chemical equation: Nitrogen and hydrogen reacted to form ammonia with a 20% conversion without any reverse reaction which meant that Ammonia did not decompose to form hydrogen and nitrogen. This 20% conversion meant that 20% of the limiting reacted would react to form ammonia while leaving the other 80% unconverted. Since the hydrogen and nitrogen entered at a fix ratio of 3:1, both the nitrogen and the hydrogen were the limiting reactant in this process and we could just pick anyone arbitrarily. The EFFLUENT