Chemical engineering interest

All the scientific and engineering disciplines involved in materials research are in need of better instrumentation and facihties. Suitable equipment for chemical engineers interested in materials questions might include the following ... 

A greater emphasis on surface and interfacial phenomena is needed for all chemical engineers interested in materials engineering. 

Various schemes have been proposed for classifying poisons, but the one that is perhaps the most convenient for chemical engineers interested in reactor design is the classification in terms of the manner by which the poison affects chemical activity. In these terms one can distinguish between four general but not sharply differentiated classes. 

Costs of many individual pieces of equipment arc summarized in Chapter 20, but analysis of the costs of complete processes is beyond the scope of this book. References may be made, however, to several collections of economic analyses of chemical engineering interest that have been published ... 

A very early application of liquid film flow in the chemical industry is mentioned in a patent of 1836 (G5) hydrogen chloride gas produced in the Leblanc soda process was absorbed by water films flowing over packings. Much later the film coolers and evaporators used in the German beet sugar industry inspired the earliest detailed theoretical and experimental studies of flow and heat transfer in falling films (CIO, N6, N7). Chemical engineering interest in film flow has increased rapidly in recent years. 

The population balance equation is a framework for the modeling of particulate systems. These include dispersions involving solid particles, liquid drops, and gas bubbles spanning a variety of systems of chemical engineering interest. The detailed derivation of the population balance equation and its applications can be found in Ramkrishna (1985, 2000). Publications pioneering the general application of population balance are by Hulburt and Katz (1964), Randolph and Larson (1964), and Frederickson et al. (1967). 

For the inverse problems of chemical engineering interest, the reader is referred to Ramkrishna and coworkers (Sathyagal et al. (1985), Muralidhar and Ramkrishna (1989), Wright and Ramkrishna... 

Chemical engineering interest in this technology centres on the use of such reactors in manufacturing drugs and fine chemicals at scales of up to, for example, 5(X) tonnes/year, rather than for bulk chemical production although, as illustrated later, the work of Chart Energy and Chemicals with their plate fin heat exchanger reactor has extended into the bulk application area. 

The manufacture of vanillin shows the progress made in the chemistry and chemical engineering of the substance. Most commercial vanillin is synthesized from guaiacol the remainder is obtained by processing waste sulfite Hquors. Preparation by oxidation of isoeugenol is of historical interest only. 

Many additional consistency tests can be derived from phase equiUbrium constraints. From thermodynamics, the activity coefficient is known to be the fundamental basis of many properties and parameters of engineering interest. Therefore, data for such quantities as Henry s constant, octanol—water partition coefficient, aqueous solubiUty, and solubiUty of water in chemicals are related to solution activity coefficients and other properties through fundamental equiUbrium relationships (10,23,24). Accurate, consistent data should be expected to satisfy these and other thermodynamic requirements. Furthermore, equiUbrium models may permit a missing property value to be calculated from those values that are known (2). 

OTHER McGRAW-HILL CHEMICAL ENGINEERING BOOKS OF INTEREST... 

Ejectors and injectors are the two types of jet pumps of interest to chemical engineers. The ejector, also called the siphon, exhauster, or eductor, is designed for use in operations in which the head pumped against is low and is less than the head of the fluid used for pumping. 

Although there are many practical applications for which the sorbent is discarded after one use, most applications of interest to chemical engineers involve the removal of adsorbates from the sorbent (i.e., regeneration). This allows the adsorbent to be reused and the adsorbates to be recovered. 

Classification is by definition used preponderantly in the treatment of raw materials. However, these raw materials find their way into chemical processing per se and thus become of interest to the chemical engineer, particularly when the products to be treated reaci better when of a defined cleanliness, size, gravity, or moisture content. 

This level of simplicity is not the usual case in the systems that are of interest to chemical engineers. The complexity we will encounter will be much higher and will involve more detailed issues on the right-hand side of the equations we work with. Instead of a constant or some explicit function of time, the function will be an explicit function of one or more key characterizing variables of the system and implicit in time. The reason for this is that of cause. Time in and of itself is never a physical or chemical cause—it is simply the independent variable. When we need to deal with the analysis of more complex systems the mechanism that causes the change we are modeling becomes all important. Therefore we look for descriptions that will be dependent on the mechanism of change. In fact, we can learn about the mechanism of... 

The description of shock-compressed matter derived from physical and chemical observations, as presented in this book, is significantly different from that denved strictly from mechanical characteristics, which are the classical descriptions. This volume, with over 300 references and summaries of major review articles, provides a succinct introduction and critical analysis for scientists and engineers interested in the present state of shock-compression science. 

Purely physical laws mainly control the behaviour of very large particles. Further down the particle size range, however, specific surface area, i.e. surface area per unit mass, increases rapidly. Chemical effects then become important, as in the nucleation and growth of crystals. Thus, a study of particulate systems within this size range of interest has become very much within the ambit of chemical engineering, physical chemistry and materials science. 

Despite the lack of interest in human factors issues in the CPI in the past, the situation is now changing. In 1985, Trevor Kletz published his landmark book on human error in the CPI An Engineer s View of Human Error (revised in 1991). Several other books by the same author e.g., Kletz (1994b) have also addressed the issue of human factors in case studies. Two other publications have also been concerned specifically with human factors in the process industry Lorenzo (1990) was commissioned by the Chemical Manufacturers Association in the USA, and Mill (1992), published by the U.K. Institution of Chemical Engineers. In 1992, CCPS and other organizations sponsored a conference on Human Factors and Human Reliability in Process Safety (CCPS, 1992c). This was further evidence of the growing interest in the topic within the CPI. 

The use of even the very simple models for isothermal operation described in Section IV,B requires a substantial amount of information regarding the elementary iate processes occurring in a gas-liquid-particle operation, as discussed in Section IV,A. While a considerable amount of information of this kind is available in the chemical engineering literature, it is widely scattered. It will be attempted in this section to present a comprehensive review of this information in order to facilitate its use. It is hoped that this review will be of value not only to those chemical engineers directly interested in the practical applications of gas-liquid-particle operations, but also, by pointing to the several areas characterized by very limited information, to those interested in research in this field. 

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