Semet-Solvay coke ovens

Semet-Solvay The Semet-Solvay Engineering Corporation, Syracuse, NY, was best known for its coke-oven technology, developed from the end of the 19th century. The eponymous process was a cyclic, non-catalytic process for making fuel gas from oil. 

Shimomura then focused his attention to a career in industry and selected the development of the coke-manufacturing process with its recovery of gas, tar, and ammonia by-products as his new area of research. To investigate this process he was sent to the United States and Europe in 1896-1897 where he selected Semet-Solvay coke ovens to be the most adequate. 

Section through a Semet-Solvay by-product recovery coking oven. This was one of the most common types of coking ovens during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pusher machine is shown discharging coke into a coke car gases are recovered at the oven s top. Reprinted, by permission, from H. C. Porter, Coal Carbonization (New York The Chemical Catalog Company, 1924), 174. 

---