Facts At Your Fingertips
Facts At Your Fingertips: Overview of Reactor Types
Reactors are at the core of most processes in the chemical process industries (CPI) and are broken down most broadly by whether their operating mode is non-flow (batch) or continuous. Each reactor type has advantages and disadvantages depending on the…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Metal-Organic Frameworks: Industrial Applications
Metal-organic framework materials (MOFs) have garnered considerable attention as candidate materials for a number of applications, such as gas storage, molecular separation and catalysis, because their organic and inorganic components are highly tunable at the molecular level. Since being introduced…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Preventing Leaks in Small-Diameter Piping
Editor's note: The content in the following column is adapted from the following article: Palluzi, R., Leak Prevention in Small-bore Piping and Tubing, Chem. Eng., October 2020, pp. 22–25. The original article can be found here. Leakage can negatively affect…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Bolted Flange Joint Assemblies
Flange-bolted joints enable connections of singular segments of pipes into more complex sections, as well as joining measuring and process devices, such as flowmeters, pumps, fans and pressure vessels. These joints are potential sources of leakage, which can introduce safety…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Plant Cybersecurity Awareness
The expanding use of digitalization tools at chemical process industries (CPI) facilities, coupled with the ongoing convergence of operational technology (OT) systems with traditional computer information technology (IT) systems, has increased plant cybersecurity risks. All plant personnel play a role…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Standard Masses for Calibration of Weighing Instruments
Accurately and efficiently weighing raw materials and reagents is a key part of many chemical processes, research projects and laboratory analysis. Poor weighing accuracy can contribute to lost revenue, increased labor costs and lower product quality. Calibration of weighing instruments…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Control-Valve Emissions and Packing
Fugitive emissions — defined as unintended releases of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from process equipment to the atmosphere — have been a long-standing issue in the chemical process industries (CPI). Valves and pumps are two of the leading sources. With…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Conceptualizing Fluid Viscosity
Viscosity is an important property for understanding the flow behavior of liquids, mixtures, emulsions, slurries and other materials in industrial processes. This one-page reference provides a refresher on conceptualizing viscosity. Intermolecular forces Viscosity is a measure of a material’s resistance…
Facts at your Fingertips: Mixing Intensity in Stirred Tanks
The ability to quantify liquid motion in a stirred tank is a basic step toward understanding how mixing influences process results. Quantifying mixing according to a mixing index (MI) can evaluate and predict mixing intensity related to fluid velocities in…
Facts At Your Fingertips: Fractional Solvent-Free Melt Crystallization
Fractional crystallization is a stage-wise separation technique that relies upon the liquid-solid phase change and enables the purification of multi-component mixtures, as long as none of the constituents can act as a solvent to the others. Thanks to the level…