http://cheme.info Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:15:13 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Modeling acid gas scrubbing requires the use of fairly specialized physical property models and, in many cases, one cannot assume equilibrium between phases. Using an appropriate physical property model is key to successfully modeling any unit operation. General purpose simulators like Aspen Plus, PRO II, etc. have dozens of physical property ... http://cheme.info/consulting/process-simulation/modeling-acid-gas-scrubbing/ I have been fortunate enough to visit quite a few places in the course of my work but I think the most "middle of nowhere" place I have ever been was the bauxite mine in Nhulunby/Gove in the Australian Northern Territories. [Nhulunby is the aboriginal name for the area, and ... http://cheme.info/consulting/travel-anecdotes/unexpected-perils-of-the-engineering-profession/ Ammonia plants use a combination of steam reforming and shift reactors to convert air, steam, and a hydrocarbon feedstock to a stream containing hydrogen, nitrogen, and CO2. The CO2 needs to be removed before the H2/N2 stream is sent to the synthesis loop. The CO2 removal is accomplished using a ... http://cheme.info/consulting/engineering-anecdotes/the-perils-of-hot-caustic/ I should state at the outset that I know little about the current state of CAPE OPEN and how well it is serving the process industries. (If someone wants to send me their comments on the current state of CAPE-OPEN, I will be happy to append it here). CAPE-OPEN My feeling is ... http://cheme.info/consulting/process-simulation/open-source-vs-cape-open/ Australia is a large country (with a small population) which has lots of coal reserves, quite a lot of natural gas, and virtually no oil. Back in the 1980's after the first Middle East oil embargo and against the continuing backdrop of Middle East political unrest, the Australian Department of Primary ... http://cheme.info/consulting/engineering-anecdotes/modeling-the-future-synfuels-from-aussie-coal/ One of my strangest (and scariest) experiences was my visit to the SASOL plant at Secunda. This is the largest synthetic fuels plant in the world and is situated on an open grassy plain a few hours drive east of Johannesburg. My recollection was that my plane arrived in Johannesburg around ... http://cheme.info/consulting/engineering-anecdotes/surreal-south-africa-visiting-secunda/ I spent about a year at Kennecott Development working on a project for Kennecott’s Carborundum subsidiary (I think Carborundum is now owned by Saint Gobain). We were developing two processes for making boron nitride ceramic fibers. One process ... http://cheme.info/consulting/engineering-anecdotes/keepin-it-dry-spinning-boron-oxide-fibers/ A lot of process design is cut and dried but the fun part is finding creative ways to change or improve the process. I worked for a couple of years on the CUPROSUL process. This process used copper sulfate to scrub H2S out of various ... http://cheme.info/consulting/engineering-anecdotes/yellow-crystals-creativity-in-process-design/ There is a tendency to move process development to the next scale prematurely. Since the cost increases substantially with each increase in scale, it makes much more sense to study the process as much as possible at the ... http://cheme.info/consulting/engineering-anecdotes/scale-up-stay-small-as-long-as-possible/ People often think of process simulation in terms of designing new processes. But it can be provide very useful insights into an existing plant’s operation. While working for AspenTech, I modeled an ammonia ... http://cheme.info/consulting/engineering-anecdotes/never-too-late-to-simulate-modeling-existing-plants/