Douglas B. Clark
Douglas Clark is a copywriter and speechwriter with a healthy appetite for all things digital. He has more than 15 years' agency and independent experience in corporate and marketing communication, and his clients come from diverse industries, specializing in anything from financial products and toothpaste to software for the visualization of computational fluid dynamics data. Among his clients are Accenture, American Express, Coca-Cola, Colgate-Palmolive, Hewlett-Packard, and Panasonic.
This video tutorial from the Learn ChemE YouTube series looks at how to calculate the degrees of freedom of a distillation column using an interactive simulation. This example deals with cases where some mole fractions and flow rates are known. Mass balances can be done on one part of the system (reboiler, condenser, or column) or on the overall system. More information on the simulation in this tutorial is available here.
You can find dozens more related tutorials in the material and energy balances playlist and tutorials on many other chemical engineering topics in the Learn ChemE series. Want to see more interactive simulations? Check out the Learn ChemE site dedicated to simulations.