An interdisciplinary team of biologists, chemists and engineers from the University of Portsmouth (U.K.; www.port.ac.uk) have become the first to successfully grow a limpet-inspired biomaterial with extreme strength. The common limpet (Patella vulgata) is a small, snail-like mollusk with a…
Last month, operation began at Polar Night Energy Oy’s (Tampere, Finland; www.polarnightenergy.com) first commercial sand-based thermal-energy storage system. The thermal storage system, which is located at the Vatajankoski power plant, is now producing low-emission district heating to the city of…
Ethernet Advanced Physical Layer (APL) provides connectivity between field-generated data and enterprise systems. Presented here is information on the design and operation of this rapidly expanding technology Process plants today have vast amounts of data available at the field level…
Transparent polymer film started with an accident . . . and spurred a packaging revolution One night in Paris, in 1900, Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger was enjoying dinner in a restaurant when he noticed that a fellow patron had spilled…
In an advancement toward circularity for commodity plastics, researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; www.ornl.gov) have developed a method for upcycling the commodity thermoplastic acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) into an ABS-vitrimer material that can be…
Heat transfer fluids (HTFs) provide heating and cooling of process equipment, including reactors, autoclaves, distillation columns, reboilers, mixers and dryers. HTF system designs should provide for effective system venting, both of residual water at startup and of degradation products during…
Achema (www.achema.de), the global forum for the chemical engineering and process industries presented by Dechema e.V. (www.dechema.de), is taking place August 22–26 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. This year’s event will feature over 2,000 exhibitors and a comprehensive technical program.…
Advances in sliding-vane and internal-gear seal-less pump technologies can provide many benefits when compared to centrifugal pumps or more well-known positive-displacement pump options Facilities in the chemical process industries (CPI) use a wide array of flowing substances that must be…
Understanding the working principles of scrolling and pushing centrifuges can help when deciding which type to use. Feed properties and other factors also play a role When looking for a proven solution for mechanical dewatering, you will most likely come…
Henry Kister shares lessons learned from troubleshooting distillation towers In 1988, the author led a team to troubleshoot a chemical tower that was revamped to achieve a small increase in capacity (up to 4%) by increasing the tray hole areas…