Mitsubishi Materials Corp. (edlinks.chemengonline.com/6899-535), with the project support of Petroleum Energy Center, Japan, (both Tokyo), has developed a new thermal process that uses supercritical (SC) water to crack vacuum distillation residue oil (VR) into clean, lighter oil with a high…
Crossflow (CF) filtration is widely used for separating substances with poor filtration properties. As the method’s name implies, a crossflow of the feed continuously flows across the filter membrane in order to wash away material accumulations that clog the membrane…
In the chemical process industries (CPI), pressure is constantly on to improve filtration. The filtration step has to be performed quickly (time is money), efficiently (product loss is money lost), and effectively (energy costs for pumping and drying…
A simpler and more-efficient way to obtain purified terephthalic acid (PTA) has been developed by GTC Technology (Houston, Tex.; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6895-537). In conventional PTA production, p-xylene is oxidized to crude terephthalic acid (CTA), then purified by hydrogenation in an aqueous solution.…
Winemaking still involves traditional batchwise processing steps, such as batch fining with bentonite clay to prevent heat instability in protein haze formation. This is typically done by adding “rule-of-thumb” amounts of clay, allowing it to settle and decanting the wine.…
Improvements in cartridge dirt-holding capacity has led to new designs, as well as to new equations for filter selection and specification, which are linked to dramatic improvements in the time between turnarounds and filter changeout. Cartridge filtration serves…
Last month, after just two years, Maaike Kroon completed her Ph.D. from the Technical University of Delft (Netherlands; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6891-544) for developing a sustainable and inexpensive production process that enables reaction and separation operations to be performed in the same vessel.…
New crystallization-system designs rely on previous successful installations and rules for scaling-up systems to adapt to slightly different conditions. However, guidelines or rules of thumb have underlying assumptions that might have been ignored when scaling-up a system during…
Consider these points when selecting and specifying equipment that separates material according to particle size Screening is an integral part of many dry material processes, ensuring an end product that is free of fine or oversized material, or in some…
MPI Technologies AB (Lund, Sweden; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6518-545) is expanding its production capabilities for making molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) so that batch quantities of 3–5 kg/wk will be possible. MIPs are stable polymers in which artificial receptor sites have been created to…