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Engineering Practice: Piping Design Part 5: Installation and Cleaning

  This fifth in a series of articles [1 – 4] on piping design discusses the practical issues of installation and cleaning. Pipe installation The installation of pipe follows its fabrication and is very frequently a part of it. The…

Environmental Manager: A Checklist for Safer Chemical Batch Reactions

A good understanding of the reaction chemistry is needed for a safe process design It is a fact that safety-related incidents do occur in the chemical process industries (CPI). These incidents have, in part, led to increased attention to reactive-chemical…

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Facts at Your Fingertips: Membranes

Separation by a membrane is achieved by creating a boundary between different bulk gas or liquid mixtures. As different solvents and solutes flow through a membrane at different rates, separation is achieved. Here, we will focus on three filtration techniques:…

Cover Story Part 1: Are You Ready For REACH?

  This is an important year for any company that makes, uses, buys or sells chemicals or products containing chemicals. On June 1, 2007, the European Union’s (EU) Regulation on Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical substances (REACH) came…

Cover Story Part 2: REACH: A Timely Overview

On Dec. 18, 2006, the European Union (EU) passed a new law creating a single integrated system for the registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals, which is known as REACH. Described as the most important EU regulation in the last…

Column Instrumentation Basics

An understanding of instrumentation is valuable in evaluating and troubleshooting column performance Instrumentation is critical to understanding and troubleshooting all processes. Very few engineers specialize in this field, and many learn about instrumentation through experience, myth and rumor. A good…

Sensing Change in Batch Reactors

The batch reactor is the workhorse of the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Within it, many different unit operations are performed such as chemical reactions, bioreactions, crystallization, distillation and dissolution. Despite their significance to the industry, batch reactors have been…

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Maintaining and Repairing Heat Exchanger Tubes

Tube plugging is probably the most frequently used maintenance and repair technique for the tube side of an exchanger. This article provides information on how to locate the positions of tube failures and discusses why it is important to know…

Pump Hazardous Liquids Safely

Reduce the problems associated with handling hazardous liquids by following these guidelines Pumps are one of the most ubiquitous items of equipment found in chemical processing plants. Often, they are used to transfer hazardous liquids, such as flammable, combustible, toxic…

CPI Water & Steam Chemistry

Careful control of water and steam chemistry at CPI facilities can pay off handsomely in reliable operation Sometimes lost in the hustle and bustle of production issues at chemical-process-industries (CPI) facilities is that high-purity water, and steam produced thereby, is…