Technical & Practical
Draining Vessels
Throughout the chemical process industries (CPI), the need to drain a tank or process vessel arises. In batch-type plants, it is a regular occurrence and is one factor that affects the total cycle time per batch and ultimately the entire…
Spray Drying Parameters
Among the most widely used technologies in the chemical process industries (CPI), spray drying involves dispersing a liquid or slurry in a hot gas to produce a dry powder product. A wide range of pumpable solutions, suspensions and emulsions can…
Tubing for peristaltic dosing pumps
Peristaltic pumps work by compressing a tube against a circular pump housing with rollers on a rotating arm. The fluid that is ahead of the roller gets pushed forward, while new fluid is drawn into the tube by the vacuum…
A method for quantifying pipe vibrations
Failures of piping due to vibration-induced fatigue are a serious problem in the chemical process industries (CPI) and a matter of concern for the safety and reliability of plant operations. Due to the complexity of flow-induced vibrations in pipes, no…
Water-saving strategies for the CPI
Reducing freshwater consumption and wastewater discharge at large petroleum-refining and chemical-production facilities can lower costs, while allowing plants to expand production capacities without having to secure additional freshwater resources and without having to enlarge their wastewater treatment plants. The key…
Rules of Thumb For Pneumatic Conveying Pipelines
Quite often, during the design of conveying systems, not enough attention is paid to the design of the conveying pipeline and its components. This disregard often leads to some major conveying system problems such as low conveying rates, conveying line…
Centrifugal Compressors for CPI Plants
The growth in use of centrifugal compressors in chemical process industries (CPI) applications in recent decades has been brought about by four factors: 1) advances in dry gas seal technology; 2) modern aerodynamic, rotor-dynamic and thermodynamic knowledge and techniques; 3)…
Pipe Bends in Dilute-phase Pneumatic Conveying
Pneumatic conveying of solid material provides advantages over mechanical conveying systems in many applications, including those that require complex routing, multiple source-destination combinations and product containment. Routing of pneumatic piping offers process operators great layout flexibility, but taking advantage of…
Thermal Integration Of Reboilers
The approaches currently used by process integration specialists to assess the opportunities for the integration of reboilers are frequently erroneous and lead to proposals that have to be rejected at the detailed engineering stages or worse, to commissioned reboilers that…
Better Chemistry By Design
At one time, the design of distillation columns and other major components for the chemical process industries (CPI) required engineers to make one-at-a-time calculations in order to project what-if scenarios covering the processes, equipment, raw materials and capital necessary for…