In the pharmaceutical, biotech and food processing industries, ingredients are transported, mixed, heated and cooled assuming the assurance of product purity required by lawmakers and taken for granted by consumers. Integral to the design of fluid-handling systems that…
For many years, the job of a control room operator at a petroleum refinery or chemical plant was seen as relatively simple: Keep the process running and fix it when it breaks. That perception is changing as more…
In widespread use throughout chemical process plants, centrifugal pumps are often employed (and taken for granted) in severe service conditions. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that problems can arise during their operation. A major difficulty facing the chemical…
Trends in the worldwide chemical process industries, especially a steep rise in the compression and liquefaction of gases to lower the costs of their storage and transportation, have heightened the engineer's need to have a working familiarity with…
The usage of Coriolis flowmeters for measuring mass flowrates has become widespread in the chemical process industries, and the range of fluids with which these meters can be employed is likewise diverse. Among those applications, Coriolis flowmeters can readily be…
Air pollution is monitored by many different regulatory programs, some of which require that emissions be measured continuously. This task is often accomplished by directly measuring air pollutants with continuous emissions monitoring systems (CEMS). In recent years, innovative…
The beauty of fiber-optical spectroscopy is that small, inexpensive devices with no moving parts bring their capacity to where the samples are, rather than the other way round. As a result, spectra can be recorded in almost real…
Processes incorporating bulk solids handling are ubiquitous in the chemical process industries (CPI), including the chemical, petrochemical, polymer, biochemical, agricultural chemicals, paints/pigments, energy and power, pulp and paper, and pharmaceutical industries, to name a few. Studies conducted during…
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs), together with particulate matter, sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, are major components of air pollution that can lead to serious environmental and health hazards. Physical, chemical and biological treatment methods are available to remove…
Intelligent — and thorough — preparation of a process-design-basis document can make the difference between a high-quality design for a chemical-process project and a poor one. The process-design-basis document represents the owner’s instructions to the design engineering organization…