The route is the wet chlorination of copper in a 300 g/L NaCl brine of US 3 030 178 A (Schering, 1962), run as a batch: the brine, made up from salt, water, a little hydrochloric acid and a tenth of the recycled mother liquor, is charged into R-101 over fresh copper and the copper heel kept from the previous batch, heated to 353 K, and chlorine is dosed below the surface over 3 h and absorbed. The chlorine forms copper(II) chloride on the metal, which the excess copper (about 50 %, as US 4 582 579 A uses) reduces to copper(I); after a 1 h post-reaction 0.5 % of the copper is left as copper(II) and the brine holds about 129 g/L CuCl (103 g/kg). The liquor is cooled to 308 K and drawn off through the strainer into about seven volumes of nitrogen-sparged water (US 3 121 609 A), where 76.5 % of its CuCl precipitates; the rest stays dissolved, on an ASSUMED solubility (a power law in the chloride through two open points of US 4 308 239 A, 3.79 g per kg of mother liquor). The crystals settle, the clear liquor is decanted, and the slurry is filtered in the agitated filter-dryer F-101, reslurry-washed with hydrochloric acid of pH 1, washed with ethanol (CN 1 696 062 A) and vacuum-dried at 333 K under nitrogen. The modelled product is 99.8 wt% CuCl, an ASSUMED upper bound (no oxidation by air in the model; the open specification is at least 98 wt%). The yield is 77.6 % on copper: 22.3 % of the copper leaves with the brine (22.1 % dissolved), 75 kg of copper-bearing brine per kg of product, to copper recovery and wastewater treatment outside the boundary.
The batch is modelled with cheme-as-code 1.9.0: R-101 is a semi-batch (reactor: semibatch) with the chlorine as an absorbed gas dose (core ADR 0054); the copper heel and the recycled mother liquor are tears converged by propagate (core ADR 0060); the precipitation and the acid reslurry wash are crystallizers with the brine's other solutes as spectators and a solubility measured_in the mother liquor (core ADR 0056); the filter-dryer is one recipe vessel over six steps with Ruth filtration times and core's dryer to a residual moisture (core ADR 0057); R101 writes its heat at its energy port (core ADR 0059). The recipe gives the cycle (9.37 h, R-101 the bottleneck, 846 batches a year), sizes R-101 (5 m3) and F-101 (1 m3) and checks R-101's jacket on the cooling water's log-mean temperature. Kinetics are ASSUMED (no open data): the dosed chlorine accumulates 0.63 % and the cooling-failure temperature reaches 354.2 K (core, each reaction alone; 354.4 K for the reaction network by hand) against an MTT of 373.1 K (water). At a hundred times slower rates the accumulation is 28.1 % and core gives 363.5 K, but the network's MTSR, with the comproportionation heat that core leaves out, reaches 372.1 K: within about 1 K of the MTT on water's boiling point. The dosing therefore stops on a sign of accumulation (a recorded safety requirement), and the chlorine held would exceed its solubility and break through to the vent scrubber, which is sized for the whole chlorine feed (D-011). The filter-dryer handles ethanol above its flash point under nitrogen (D-011). See DESIGN.md for every assumption.
