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Chemical Engineering vocabulary · Process Fundamentals and Balances

Unit operation

Meaning in chemical engineering, with examples

nounCore term

In chemical engineering, unit operation means: A basic physical step that appears in many different processes, such as distillation, filtration, drying or heat exchange. Any plant can be described as a chain of these steps.

In Turkish: temel işlem, birim işlem

How it is used

Used at university and in design work to break a process into blocks. Courses and textbooks are often called 'Unit Operations', and engineers say a plant 'consists of' or 'combines' several unit operations.

Example sentences

  1. The downstream section has three main unit operations: extraction, evaporation and crystallization.

  2. Before you size anything, draw each unit operation as a block and label every stream.

Common collocations

  • key unit operation
  • separation unit operation
  • combine unit operations
  • unit operations lab
  • distillationA way of separating a liquid mixture by boiling it and condensing the vapor, using the fact that the components boil at different temperatures.
  • filtrationSeparating solid particles from a liquid or a gas by passing the mixture through a porous medium, such as a cloth, mesh or cartridge, that holds the solids back.
  • dryingRemoving water or another liquid from a solid, usually by heating it with hot gas or under vacuum, until it reaches the required moisture content.
  • process flow diagramA drawing that shows the main equipment of a plant, how the streams connect them and the key operating data such as flows, temperatures and pressures.
  • mass balanceA calculation based on the rule that mass is not created or destroyed: everything that goes into a system must come out, react or build up inside it.

More terms: Process Fundamentals and Balances

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