Tier 0 screening per tonne of reagent-grade benzyl alcohol: feeds, by-product, water and heat from a 1982 patent's pilot example, brine and CO2 by stoichiometry, electricity from core's default. No flowsheet; not reviewed.
Benzyl alcohol by continuous hydrolysis of benzyl chloride with soda solution
Tier 0 screening per tonne of reagent-grade benzyl alcohol: feeds, by-product, water and heat from a 1982 patent's pilot example, brine and CO2 by stoichiometry, electricity from core's default. No flowsheet; not reviewed.
Research outputNot engineering advice and not an approved design: do not use it for construction, operation or safety decisions. What this means
Overview
- Capacity
- per tonne of benzyl alcohol (the dataset's basis); no plant size
What goes in and out
In
- Benzyl chlorideFeedstock
- Sodium carbonateFeedstockdissolved to a 10.9 wt% solution, 10 % molar excess
- WaterFeedstocksoda solution and wash water
Out
- Benzyl alcoholMain productreagent grade, at least 99.8 wt%
- WastewaterWastespent brine (its NaCl and excess soda are counted as emissions to water)
- Carbon dioxideEmissionCO2 of the reacted carbonate, vented at degassing
Utilities: Electricity (core's Tier 0 default (ASSUMED, dated)), Steam (counted as heat delivered (kWh); the source gives energy without its carrier)
Life cycle assessment
No footprint assessed yet; the process is part of the life-cycle inventory below.
In the open LCI database (cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4) as Benzyl alcohol, reagent grade (at least 99.8 wt%) Preliminary.
Download it for Brightway, openLCA and other tools.
In the LCI database: system model, datasets and KPIs against the benchmarks
In the LCI database
- Status
- Preliminary 3 unmapped exchanges. Some exchanges have no background mapping yet: they are exported unlinked and count no burden, so the inventory is incomplete.
- System model
- attributional, cut-off (methodology 1.1.0)
- Allocation
- mass (single-output, from default) · product:benzyl-alcohol 100 %
- Allocation findings
- none
- Change report
- Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.
- Dataset pages
- Benzyl alcohol, reagent grade (at least 99.8 wt%) Preliminary
KPI benchmark positions
| KPI | Value | Reference range | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heat (steam) per t of benzyl alcohol No open source independent of the dataset's with a benzyl alcohol heat or steam figure was found (2026-11-05). Read: US 5,750,801 and CS 216044 B1 (no energy figures), IPCC 2006 Vol. 3 ch. 2 (process CO2 only), the EU LVOC BREF 2017 (doi:10.2760/77304; no benzyl alcohol section). Not read: Ullmann's chapter on benzyl alcohol (licensed). The dataset's value is EP 0 064 486 A1, Table 3, a pilot figure. | – kWh/t | not available | not evaluated |
| Benzyl alcohol yield on benzyl chloride, fraction of theory | – kg/kg | 0.95 to 0.955 kg/kg | not evaluated |
Maturity and review
Design maturity Concept (claimed): An idea or first flowsheet; numbers are rough. No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.
Calculation maturity, from the checked evidenceNot assessed
The process has no maturity report (cheme maturity, checks/maturity.json), so no calculation maturity is established.
No level shownThe design maturity (Concept) is the manifest's claim, not evidence. A level appears here once the process's repository holds a current report from
cheme maturity --write.Artifact completeness
Which deliverables exist. They never raise a calculation maturity level: a drawing from unchecked numbers is still unchecked.
Not reported without a maturity report.
Independent review
Not independently reviewed
No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.
Set by people only. Reaching a calculation maturity level or passing automated checks is not an independent review or an approval.
Where the evidence comes from
- Report
processes/benzyl-alcohol-1/checks/maturity.json(not in the library)- Method
- How ChemE-as-Code checks the levels (requirement by requirement)
Open items
0 open items · 0 closed
New action itemNew engineering holdNew technical queryNew design changeAll issues
Sources
- Library version
- a3c52e4 (process last changed in a3c52e4)
- Data
- Catalog record (JSON) · CC-BY-4.0
- Files
- View the files on GitHub · change history and authors
References
- Rantala, R. K., Hag, G. L. F. (Eka AB) (1982) Method and apparatus for the hydrolysis of alpha-chlorinated toluene compounds. European patent application EP 0 064 486 A1, Tables 1 to 3
- Buysch, H.-J. et al. (Bayer AG) (1998) Process for the continuous preparation of benzyl alcohol. US patent 5,750,801 (prior art section and Example)
- Czechoslovak patent CS 216044 B1 (filed 1979, published 1982) Method of continuous preparation of benzyl alcohol (introduction, Examples 1 and 2; read in the machine translation of Google Patents)
- IPCC (2006) 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, Vol. 3, ch. 2 Mineral Industry Emissions, Table 2.1 and section 2.5
How to cite
For the data, cite the Process Atlas paper; for the platform that builds and checks it, the ChemE-as-Code paper.
Schweidtmann, A. M. & Weber, J. M. (2026, in preparation). Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title).
For this process: "Benzyl alcohol by continuous hydrolysis of benzyl chloride with soda solution", ChemE-as-Code process library, version a3c52e4.
BibTeX
@unpublished{schweidtmann_process_atlas,
author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M. and Weber, Jana M.},
title = {{Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title)}},
year = {2026},
url = {https://atlas.cheme-as-code.org},
note = {in preparation}
}Schweidtmann, A. M. (2026). ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering. arXiv:2611.07947. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947
BibTeX
@misc{schweidtmann_cheme_as_code,
author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M.},
title = {{ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering}},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2611.07947},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947}
}