Technical & Practical
Designing for A Safe Process
Accidents do happen. While not everything can be predicted, addressing safety concerns throughout the design of a process can help to prevent accidents from occurring. Designing with safety in mind can also help to minimize potentially serious consequences…
Troubleshooting Field Failures of Rupture Disks
Understanding why rupture disks fail can help ensure that they don’t Even with the best process design, the unexpected can happen. Anticipating this, rupture disks are often installed as the last line of defense against the over-pressurization of equipment used…
Factors Affecting Screening Performance
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…
Crystallizers And Agitators
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…
Assess Your Plant’s True Water-Savings Potential
For companies in the chemical process industries, water is an indispensable utility. But the growing scarcity of quality industrial water, combined with stricter environmental regulations and the rising cost of wastewater treatment, have encouraged the conservation of water…
The Do’s and Don’ts Of Chute Design
The need to transfer bulk-solids materials from the outlet of a bin or from a conveyor, to a process, truck, or another bin is ubiquitous throughout the chemical process industries (CPI). Transferring material using equipment designed to mechanically…
Handle Steam More Intelligently
The dramatic jump in petroleum and natural gas prices over the recent years has created much impetus to reduce operating costs at chemical process plants. In processes that use either oil or gas for feedstock, such reduction can…
Steam Management: Don’t Send Money Down the Drain
Energy consciousness and environmental awareness have transformed condensate from an inexpensive byproduct of steam distribution to a valuable resource that can substantially reduce operating costs. For process systems that use steam as the heat transfer media, improved condensate…
The Mass Balance
More and more, it is recognized that business and science are interwoven, and that these disciplines can complement each other to achieve corporate goals. In the chemical process industries (CPI), a noteworthy role is that of engineering in…
Antoine Coefficients for Vapor Pressure of the Elements
Vapor pressure is important to engineers throughout the chemical process industries (CPI). Knowledge of a compound's vapor pressure is required in the design of storage vessels containing the compound. In hazard analysis, knowledge of vapor pressure…