Good role models can greatly influence the path of a person’s career. While role models don’t always receive awards, recent announcements of award recipients describe a number of professionals in chemistry and chemical engineering who have been singled out for…
As this new year opens, we at Chemical Engineering are looking forward to the wide variety of articles, activities and offerings that we have lined up for our readers. A highlight of 2015 is to honor the most-noteworthy chemical engineering…
Technology continues to change at a rapid pace — particularly when we look at recent advances to our personal computers and mobile devices. As such, we at Chemical Engineering have been working on improving our online presence by taking advantage…
Spray nozzles are very useful tools with a simple concept and sometimes complex design. Earlier this year, I attended the 26th Annual ILASS (Institute for Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems; www.ilass.org) Conference in Portland, Ore., which was held on May…
William Banholzer gave an opening keynote address at the AIChE Spring Meeting (New Orleans, La.; March 31) that was interesting, fun — and brave. It reminded me of the “Six Sigma for Research and Development [R&D]” training that UOP provided…
The newest voices calling for action by industry on climate change issues are not the regulators, politicians, industry spokespeople, engineers or scientists. They come from a potentially far more influential group: the financial analysts and economists of an organization called…
New distillation columns are getting much larger. The history of column sizes, and design and construction issues associated with large columns were recently addressed at the AIChE Spring Meeting (New Orleans, La.; March 30 to April 3) by Dan Summers…
This is my fiftieth editorial in Chemical Engineering. There have been several surprises, going all the way back to the beginning in 2010, when I was first asked if I would like to author a monthly editorial. I said that…
At the 2011 Spring AIChE meeting (Chicago, Ill.), Sean Hennigan of BP gave a presentation regarding a column troubleshoot that yielded a counterintuitive result. A column bottleneck was ultimately traced to the presence of a vacuum cleaner in a tray…
FRI is lucky to have survived a simple valve-tray project. A few years ago, the low-pressure (LP) test column stood empty, because there were no trays ready to be installed. The intention was to install a set of new valve…