Technical & Practical
Gas-Liquid Mixing: Physical Considerations
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…
A Clearer View Of Crystallizers
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…
Liquid-Gas Coalescers: Demystifying Performance Ratings
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…
New Piping Code for High-Purity Processes
In the emerging and ever-expanding areas of bioprocessing, where maintaining hygienic designs and practices is of paramount importance, and semiconductor manufacturing, which has its own stringent purity requirements, there is a need to standardize the essential codes and standards that…
Inspecting Fractionation Towers
Distillation columns are often workhorses in the chemical process industries (CPI), and at times, it is necessary to physically inspect the interior of a column. This article demonstrates what an inspection can reveal, by sharing the experience of actual fractionation-tower…
Compact, High-efficiency Heat Exchangers: Understanding Fouling
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…
Measuring Flow
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…
Cybersecurity for Chemical Engineers
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…
Maximizing Performance In Size Reduction
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…
Reduce Gas Entrainment In Liquid Lines
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…