Admittedly, this question is probably a bit elementary, but I've got to get back in practice with this sort of process.
I recently inherited a sour water stripper in a water treatment plant. Feed rate and temperature is controlled, and feed stream has known quantities of NH3, NH4, SCN, HCN, H2S. The feed also has dissolved CO2 (and all constituents) but is not tested for normally. Feed is near the top (stripping only), and overhead vapors are cooled with condensate falling into a reflux drum. All condensate is refluxed back into the column and excess vapor is taken to a different process.
It is crucial to control the temperature in the reflux drum. Pressure is typically controlled outside the process, so the temperature must be high enough that excess gas does not dissolve in the water, and rather goes off with the vapor stream. We have some experimental data for benchmarks, but I wanted to be able to simulate it for more exact answers and see if it fit the existing data.
1) Given just this data (known feed stream, pressure and temperature in reflux drum) is it possible to determine the vapor and water chemistry inside the reflux drum. My thoughts are that I'd be able to take and initial guess, solve for the drum chemistry, then add the reflux back into the column, and repeat until I reached convergence.
2) If not, the equilibrium condition of the reflux stream is relatively well known and tested, so would that be required data to fully solve.
3) The number of equations describing the drum is large, so I wanted to detail my process so far. I'm not able to back myself into an answer so I'll list them in the next post, and hopefully someone can steer me in the right direction.
Thanks