I have an ongoing dispute with a longtime colleague, Bob Miller. I said he ruined my new safety boots. He said he didn’t. Bob was a young, fearless distillation engineer at a time when our extraction engineer refused to take…
To make the modern materials we use every day, such as plastics, metals, electronics, pharmaceuticals, fuels and so on, strong acids are used to convert the earth’s raw materials into modern materials. In fact, so many tons of acid are…
Gas-liquid reactors in the chemical process industries (CPI) have increasingly been designed to handle larger manufacturing scales. Since gas-liquid reactors can represent substantial capital and operating costs for the user, optimizing mixing and maximizing productivity are critical. The need for…
Improved understanding of crystallizer equipment and operation can aid purification efforts in the CPI Crystallization is a key purification technique for various sectors of the chemical process industries (CPI). Several approaches for industrial crystallization have evolved over time, and highly…
Engineers working in the chemical process industries (CPI) sometimes have to deal with aerosol contamination issues in which liquid-gas coalescers are routinely employed. For example, liquid-gas coalescers are used to protect compressors, liquid-gas contactors, turbines, low-NOx burners, metering and instrumentation…
The topic of fouling in heat exchangers has been of increasing interest in recent years, since it is so closely linked to the cost of building and running a chemical plant. It has been reported that fouling costs are about…
One of the most important measurements in the chemical process industries (CPI) is rate of flow. Flowrates can be important to measure, and in fact can be critical to measure, throughout a process — from dosing components into a reactor…
There was a time, not long ago, when most groups responsible for industrial control systems (ICS) in the chemical process industries (CPI) were not much worried about security. They had their firewalls in place and their remote access servers, and…
Expect more in selection and scaleup, prediction of energy consumption and reliability Very seldom is a product of desired size manufactured directly in a process. Size reduction, coupled with screening (classification), is commonly used to achieve desired particle size. In…
A common practice in the chemical process industries (CPI) is to implement so-called value- maximization projects (VMP) to increase production or reduce production costs in order to increase profit margins. With such projects, one main objective of the design team…