Chemical Process design, history

The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) has a 30-year history of involvement with process safety for chemical processing plants. Through its strong ties with process designers, builders, operators, safety professionals and academia, the AIChE has enhanced communication and fostered improvement in the high safety standards of the industry. AIChE publications and symposia have become an information resource for the chemical engineering profession on the causes of accidents and means of prevention. 

First, the program needs a system (1) to record what needs to be done to have an outstanding safety program, (2) to do what needs to be done, and (3) to record that the required tasks are done. Second, the participants must have a positive attitude. This includes the willingness to do some of the thankless work that is required for success. Third, the participants must understand and use the fundamentals of chemical process safety in the design, construction, and operation of their plants. Fourth, everyone must learn from the experience of history or be doomed to repeat it. It is especially recommended that employees (1) read and understand... 

Before exploring the wide range of applications, a brief review of the history of development, a discussion of the process fundamentals, and an introduction to mechanical design issues will help to set the boundaries for use of high-gravity fields in chemical processing. 

Oils and fats have been important throughout human history not only for food, but also as lubricants, polishes, ointments, and fuel. The reaction of oils and fats with alkali (saponification) produces soap (salts of fatty acids) and glycerin. This chemical process was known to the Romans and continues to be of significant commercial importance. Today, tens of thousands of tons of soap are produced annually from tallow and plant oils. Tallow is a by-product of the meat industry, while the principal plant oils are dependent on extensive plantations—palm and palm kernel oils from Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, and coconut oil from the Philippines and Brazil. Twentieth-century chemists designed more effective synthetic, crude-oil-based surface-active agents (surfactants, e.g., sodium linearalkylbenzene-sulfonate or LAS) for fabric, household, and industrial cleaning applications, and specialty surfactants to meet the needs of consumer products industry such as milder skin and hair cleansers. 

A ny talk on the history of a dynamic subject such as chemical engi-neering must trace concepts. And how difficult that is to do. The chronicling of chemical processes and their variations and changes, or of chemical equipment, with its myriad new designs, is easier by far, except when we try to isolate and inspect the why and who. 

Without retracing a history of plastic, we can say that plastic is a material that is quintessentially industrial. From the extraction of the source material (e.g. oil), through the chemical process of its production, and onto the procedures of design and manufacture by which plastic artefacts are made, plastic belongs to the realm of the factory. It is not a material that is easily manipulable beyond the specialist combinations of machines and humans that chemically compose and process, dye, extrude, mould and finish plastic goods. Plastic, as an icon of post-war Fordist industrialization, and even the batch production of post-Fordism, has a role in the policing of the spatial boundaries between home and factory (Lefebvre 1974). 

The following narrative is taken from Kauffman [1] and describes a representative case history related to the development of a new chemical process. It shows how teams of engineers work together to provide a plant design and introduces the types of diagrams that will be explored in this chapter. 

In well-designed chemical processing plants, materials selection is based on a number of factors, such as service history, field in-plant corrosion tests, and pilot plant and laboratory corrosion tests. But, over time, laboratory tests have proven to be the most reliable and simple mean to generate information for the selection of process materials. Many of these tests are routinely performed to provide information on... 

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