CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Coriolis Meter

2011-06-24T19:06:00.002+05:30

Don't miss this fine 8 minute VIDEO on Coriolis Flowmeter.

Hazardous Area Classification

2011-06-04T07:51:00.003+05:30

Haven't posted in a long time; this is actually my first post of this year. I want to share a link which provides a 5 minute primer on Hazardous Area Classification, a subject that many process engineers find technically challenging and confusing. This primer should help in clearing some cobwebs and stimulate further reading for a deeper understanding of the various codes and practices that are followed in the industry. There is considerable amount of theoretical understanding behind the practice of Hazardous Area Classification and I would like to see it included in undergraduate chemical engineering curricula. Industry should actively push this case to get "safety-primed" process engineers.

Double Volute Pump

2010-12-02T10:09:00.004+05:30

I had a question regarding Double Volute Pumps and found some excellent references on the web:

1) http://www.pump-zone.com/articles/68.pdf

2) http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=142821&page=8

3) http://www.mcnallyinstitute.com/14-html/14-06.htm

4) http://www.engineersedge.com/pumps/centrifugal_pump.htm

One line summary : Consider Double Volute design if the pump has to operate away from its BEP for most of the time, it will eliminate most of the radial thrust due to such operation.

The Ecstasy of Commissioning

2010-09-05T19:04:00.025+05:30

Olefins by Catalytic Cracking - New Process

2010-06-23T11:57:00.002+05:30

A new process for the manufacture of Ethylene and Propylene, the two main building blocks for petrochemicals, called Advanced Catalytic Olefins (ACO) Technology, is getting ready to go into commercial operation in the last quarter of this year.
The main advantages of this new catalytic route over the well established thermal route (steam cracking) are:
• 15-25 % increase in olefins yield
• Better Propylene to Ethylene ratio of 1:1 compared to 0.5:1 for steam cracking
• Lower operating temperature of 650 degs C compared to 850 degs C for steam cracking
Licensed by KBR, the plant is being built for SK Energy at Ulsan, South Korea.

Chemical industry will be anxiously watching the start-up of this breakthrough technology, as it will have far reaching consequences for the petrochemical sector.

More details of the process at
http://www.kbr.com/Newsroom/Publications/technical-papers/A-Catalytic-Cracking-Process-for-Ethylene-and-Propylene-from-Paraffin-Streams.pdf

CP 50

2010-06-16T22:21:00.002+05:30

50 Chemical Processing companies worth watching and learning from :

http://www.chemicalprocessing.com/cp50/index.html

Growing Chemicals on Trees

2010-06-13T10:34:00.002+05:30

Plants could be genetically engineered to produce specific chemicals. Will Chemical Engineers turn into Genetic Engineers?
Further Reading : http://pubs.acs.org/cen/business/88/8823bus2.html?featured=1

Answers to Quiz on Chemical Industry Pioneers

2010-06-05T19:24:00.002+05:30

1) Herbert Henry Dow's first patent was for extraction of BROMINE
http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/dow.html

2) EUGENE JOULES HOUDRY developed the Catalytic Cracking process.
http://acswebcontent.acs.org/landmarks/landmarks/hdr/

3) FISCHER-TROPSCH Synthesis (Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch) converts coal into petroleum
http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/

4) BASF built world's first Ammonia plant
http://www.basf.com/group/corporate/en/about-basf/history/1902-1924/index

5) Carothers invented NYLON
http://www.chemheritage.org/classroom/chemach/plastics/carothers.html

QUIZ : PIONEERS OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY

2010-06-01T17:51:00.001+05:30

This Quiz should be easy for Chemical Engineers and interesting for others.

1) Employing more than 50000 people The Dow Chemical Company manufactured more than 5000 products at 214 locations in 37 countries for sales of US$ 45 billion in 2009. It is the largest chemical company in US and the 2nd largest in the world. The company was founded in 1895 by Herbert Henry Dow. For the extraction of which chemical did Dow obtain his first patent in 1889?

2) An event of far reaching consequence took place at Sun Oil Company’s Marcus Hook Refinery, Pennsylvania in 1937 when the first commercial scale Catalytic Cracking plant went on stream. This process more than doubled the output of petrol from crude petroleum and also considerably improved the quality of petrol. The man behind this revolutionary chemical process was strangely enough, a French mechanical engineer. What is his name?

3) In the 1920’s two chemists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute developed a trailblazing process to convert coal into petroleum. During World War II, coal rich Germany relied heavily on this synthetic petroleum to power its war machines. After the discovery of oil in Middle East, this synthetic route went into near oblivion. But there has been renewed interest in this process in recent times of energy crunch. What is the name of this process?

4) Feeding the world’s population would be unthinkable without the use of Ammonia based fertilizers. Which company built world’s first Ammonia plant in 1913 based on the process developed by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch? Today it is the world’s largest chemical company.

5) The world's first synthetic fibre was not presented to the scientific society but to three thousand women's club members gathered at the site of the 1939 New York World's Fair.
What was this fibre invented by Wallace Hume Carothers and his team in the laboratories of the DuPont company? Tragically Carothers killed himself in 1937 before the true magnitude of his invention could become evident.

A New Resolution

2010-05-16T23:38:00.001+05:30

Today is Akshay Trithiya, a very auspicious day for most Indians. Akshay in Sanskrit means something that cannot be diminished. It was on this day in 2006 that I started this blog with some lofty objectives. Looking back after 4 years, I realise that the blog has not made a big impact, primarily because I have not given much of me to this pursuit. The posts have been infrequent and sometimes half hearted. On this Akshay Trithiya I resolve to invest more time in the blog to make it more interesting, more inspiring and more interactive.

Energy Efficient Pumping

2010-04-25T18:33:00.002+05:30

Here is the link to an article I wote some years ago on "ENERGY EFFICIENT PUMPING".
http://www.energymanagertraining.com/Journal/08072005/Energy%20efficient%20pumping.pdf

Lessons from an Accident – Put Chemistry back into Chemical Engineering

2009-10-15T14:28:00.000+05:30

On December 19, 2007 a reactor exploded in the plant of T2 Laboratories at Jacksonville, Florida. 4 people lost their lives and 14 were hospitalized. More than 100 firefighters battled what many eyewitnesses described as a ‘hellish inferno’. Pieces of the plant were found 400 m away from the blast site. The plant was manufacturing MCMT, a gasoline additive.

So why should this accident make news again 21 months after its occurrence? The US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) which went into the reasons of the accident has published its final draft report. The report says that the accident occurred because of a runaway chemical reaction due to inadequate reactor cooling system. But that is merely stating a matter of fact. What makes the report so extraordinary is its finding that the 2 owners of the company were unaware of the potential or consequences of a runaway chemical reaction, despite their undergraduate degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering. The report minces no words to make the startling observation that most baccalaureate chemical engineering curricula in the U.S. do not specifically address reactive hazard recognition or management. It is a most harsh indictment of the state of chemical engineering education in USA. If things are this bad in the country which taught chemical engineering to rest of the world, I shudder to reflect upon the situation prevailing in Indian Universities.

CSB’s report calls for improving the education of chemical engineering students on reactive chemical hazards and asks the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) to work together to include reactive chemical education in baccalaureate chemical engineering curricula across the country. Our universities need to follow suit without any further ado. It is time to put chemistry back into chemical engineering.

When to Choose API Pump?

2009-09-29T09:51:00.004+05:30

Process engineers are often required to make a choice between API and ANSI pumps for hydrocarbon service. API is the conservative and safe option, but also very expensive and not always warranted. Though there are no clear cut guidelines on when to opt for API pump, Heinz Bloch provides the following Rule of Thumb in his book Improving Machinery Reliability – Volume 1

From a reliability point of view, API pumps are preferred for toxic, flammable or explosion prone services if one or more of the following conditions exists:

1) Head > 350 ft (107 m )
2) Temperature > 149 degs C on pumps with discharge flange > 100 NB or > 177 degs C on pumps with discharge flange <> 100 hp (74 KW)
4) Suction pressure > 75 psig
5) Rated flow > flow at BEP
6) Pump speed > 3600 rpm

Kirkpatrick Award Finalists

2009-09-24T11:41:00.003+05:30

Chemical Engineering magazine has announced names of the 5 finalists for the biennial Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award :
1) The Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.) and BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany), for an industrial process for producing propylene oxide (PO) via hydrogen peroxide
2) DuPont (Wilmington, Del.), for commercializing Cerenol — a new family of high-performance polyether glycols made from corn-derived 1,3-propanediol (Bio-PDO)
3) Lucite International (Southampton, U.K.), for its Alpha technology — a new process for making methyl methacrylate (MMA)
4) Solvay S.A. (Brussels, Belgium), for its Epicerol process — a new process for producing epichlorohydrin from glycerine
5) Uhde GmbH (Dortmund, Germany) and Evonik Industries AG (Essen, Germany) for the HPPO process for making PO via H2O2

Curiously 2 of these 5 processes are for producing Propylene Oxide via Hydrogen Peroxide. The final winner would be announced in December.

PX for RO

2009-06-18T17:51:00.001+05:30

Attended a seminar yesterday on Sea Water Desalination, jointly organized by Energy Recovery Inc (ERI) and Dow Water and Process Solutions. Seawater desalination is very energy intensive and to bring down the energy cost, the hydraulic energy of high pressure rejects has to be recovered. This is conventionally done through a turbine (Francis Turbine or Pelton Wheel) that is directly coupled to the feed pump. But the inefficiencies of turbine and pump limit the energy recovery to approximately 65%. ERI has introduced a revolutionary (literally!) device called the PX Exchanger with claims of 98% energy recovery. This consists of a spinning cartridge made from ceramic, where momentum of the high pressure reject fluid is transferred to the low pressure feed through actual contact. The contact time is however so small, of the order of 0.05 seconds, that the increase in salinity of the feed due to mixing with the concentrated rejects is only to the extent of 2.5%., which corresponds to an osmotic pressure increase of 1.3 bar. Since this increase in salinity is a function of the recovery in the RO module, ERI needs to work in close co-operation with the RO solution provider. The ERI website has a Power Model to carry out this preliminary calculation. PX devices are available in modular constructions with capacities ranging from 4.5 to 50 m3/hr. Adopting PX for energy recovery, the power required for seawater RO can be brought down to 3.5 KWH/m3.

What is Process Intensification?

2009-06-10T20:44:00.004+05:30

Currently browsing through a book on Process Intensification authored by David Reay, Colin Ramshaw and Adam Harvey. It has a delightful definition of Process Intensification - It gives every molecule the same processing experience. And the URL of my blog is validated!

The Future Tense of Energy

2009-06-08T19:19:00.007+05:30

On 5th June, World Environment Day, I gave a plenary lecture at CHEM09, the 2-day Kerala State Chemical Engineers Conference at Kochi. Organized by the Kochi Regional Centre of Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers. theme of the conference was Clean Air, Clean Water, Green Earth. I titled my talk: Energy Scenario – Turning Crisis into Opportunities. Here is a refined summary of a part of the lecture.

• Fossil fuels are a source of concentrated energy resulting from the photosynthesis efforts of thousands of millions of years and are irreplaceable in the true sense by any other conceivable alternative. In a mere couple of hundred years we have frittered away the energy accumulated over millions of years.
• Solar energy is the mother of all forms of energy and finally it is towards the mother we should look for our sustenance. Only a small fraction of sunlight hits our planet and even this is enough to meet our energy requirement few thousands of times over. The key is to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells (doubling from the present levels of 20%) so as to rapidly bring down the cost of solar energy.
• Among all the wonderful promises held out by nanotechnology, are advances in material science that can revolutionize photovoltaic cells through nanostructures and coatings of nano-particles.
• Bio-fuels can never fully replace fossil fuels and are not sustainable in the long run. The power density of biomass is less than 1 w/m2 compared to 100 w/m2 for fossil fuels. The land and water required to produce adequate biomass is enormous. The first charge on land and water should be for growing crops for food and not fuel.
• Coal meets 26% of the world’s primary energy needs and accounts for 41% of the world’s power generation, yet the perception of energy crisis is driven by oil price. The estimated reserves of coal at today’s consumption will last 130 years, more than 3 times longer than crude oil. Coal also has a better geographical spread unlike crude oil.
• As oil wells rapidly deplete, we will increasingly depend on coal and biomass during a short transition phase leading us to the age of solar energy in about 50-100 years.
• We are conditioned to think of coal as dirty. Coal emits more carbon dioxide than oil and gas and also leaves behind a residue that is problematic to dispose off. Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) and Underground Coal Gasification (UCG) are technologies which will allow us to use coal in a clean and efficient manner. IGCC is riddled with reliability issues due to short refractory life in Gasifiers, which operate at temperatures upto 1400 degrees C.
• Modern civilization is literally driven by liquid fuels, since more than 2/3 of it finds use in the transportation sector. This will put pressure to keep alive wasteful processes like coal to liquid, gas to liquid and production of liquid biofuels.
• Ethanol blends for gasoline, even at a modest 10% level cannot be sustained with corn or cane. Cellulose ethanol yields 80% more energy than that is required to grow and convert it, whereas Starch ethanol yields only 30% more. A big breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol production is only a few years away.
• In the long run hydrogen based fuel cells will drive our vehicles. But a hydrogen economy is possible only if the gas is derived by means of solar or nuclear energy or the miracle microbe that promises to split water.
• Algae is touted as the wonder fuel of the future because of its high photosynthesis efficiency and its ability to grow in saline water. This would ease the pressure on land and water for biomass cultivation. We need to mimic this nature’s model for efficient capture and storage of sunlight.

EE Motors for Hazardous Area?

2009-05-24T21:59:00.002+05:30

Yesterday's seminar on Energy Efficient Electrical Equipment organised by Indian Chemical Council (ICC) has agitated me with a disturbing question - are energy efficient motors suitable for hazardous area because they have a high starting current?

ACHEMA 2009 - My Personal Highlights

2009-05-20T19:39:00.006+05:30

Last week I fulfilled one of my dreams by attending ACHEMA. For a chemical engineer going to ACHEMA is going on HAJ. Out of the tens of lectures that I attended and hundreds of exhibitors that I managed to visit, following 10 things impressed me most.

Ten Highlights from ACHEMA2009

1) Heat transfer enhancement by inserting wires into tubes
http://www.calgavin.co.uk/
Feed – Effluent heat exchanger was revamped by wire inserts for a 15% increase in plant capacity. The resultant improvement in heat transfer coefficient was so much that the residual heat duty in the fired heater downstream of the exchanger could be brought down and because of the reduced CO2 emission, the company could claim carbon credit.
There is freely available software that can be integrated with HTRI.

2) Zero stem leak valves
http://www.habonim.com/home/default.asp
Habonim has a patented stem seal design and their ball valves meet the ISO 15848-1 standard for fugitive emission. There are also valves to meet various special situations and requirements.

3) Refractometers
http://www.kpatents.com/
K-Patents offers instruments to measure liquid density and concentration based on refraction of light.

4) E-Monitor of pump bearings
Nikkiso – KSB has a device to electronically monitor the condition of bearings of canned motor pumps while in operation.
http://www.nikkiso-ksb.com/index.php?id=25&L=1

5) High temperature Sealing
http://www.flexitallic.com/pro_therm.html
Flexitallic, the inventors of Spiral Wound Gasket offer a proprietary material Thermiculite, based on Vermiculite for high temperature applications upto 1050 degrees C.

6) Dynamic Steam Heater
http://www.deltapompen.nl/downloads/Andritz%20Dynamic%20Steam%20Heater%20GB.pdf
Andritz offers a rotating device for mixing steam into the medium for uniform and effective heating. Main application is in the pulp and paper industry.

7) Caustic Evaporation Unit using PHE’s instead of S&T HE’s
http://www.gocesco.com/customers/106112113470923/filemanager/Alfavap%20Caustic%20Soda%20Plant%20for%20Akzo%20Nobel.pdf
Alfa Laval has 38 references, largest being 1100 TPD for Olin. They claim a steam consumption of 475 kg/t NaOH. Because of the high heat transfer coefficient, steam temperatures can be brought down to 165 degrees C, and this reduces the rate of corrosion.

8) Online Pump Selection and Costing
http://www.ksb.com/ksb/tiles/easySelect.jsp?proxyId=501734
Registration required only for getting the price.

9) Reflux Condensation in PHE’s
http://www.gesmex.com/gb/allgemein/home.html
GESMEX manufactures circular plate packs which can be retrofitted in existing shell and tube heat exchangers. Condensing coefficients are better in rectangular channels than in tubes.

10) Microalgae
Microalgae cultivation is now a serious contender for CO2 capture from power plant emission. It is also an excellent source of biofuel. USA has huge investments into research on this subject. The key issue is to design large and cheap photobioreactors.

Steel is Strong, but.......

2008-06-15T08:37:00.001+05:30

My article in the Bulletin of Process Plant and Machinery Association of India (PPMAI)

Shell & Tube Heat Exchangers - Fouling Factors & Design Margins

2008-02-23T10:45:00.001+05:30

My thoughts at a Refresher Course on Heat Transfer organised by Indian Chemical Council yesterday.

Huge sums of money are spent in treating the water used for cooling tower make-up and also to control and monitor the quality of circulating cooling water. But despite successfully altering the scaling nature of the circulating cooling water, process engineers are reluctant to shirk off the legacy of the conservative fouling factors propounded in TEMA as far back as 1941.

On top of this 15-20% safety margins are added on flow and heat duty while designing heat exchangers. There are various reasons for this:

Uncertainties in process
Uncertainties in physical properties
Providing for future expansion
Fear of not meeting guarantees
Mistaken notion that this will improve reliability

While revamping and de-bottlenecking plants, shell and tube heat exchangers are rarely ever replaced. I know a large petrochemical plant whose capacity was increased by 150% from 80,000 tpa to 120,000 tpa by changing catalyst, pump impellers, control valve trims and air cooler motors, but leaving all of the 50 odd shell and tube heat exchangers untouched. The hidden fat in heat exchanger design is obvious.

Using the real life cooling water chemistry in the newly introduced General Cooling Water Fouling model of HTRI reveals that the TEMA fouling factors are higher by 200-300 %. The accuracy provided by sophisticated and expensive models and software would be nullified if we keep sticking to the ultra-conservative fouling factors from TEMA.

Operating a perfectly optimised shell and tube heat exchanger at 80% of its design load would only accelerate fouling because of the lower velocities and hence thicker boundary layer film. Do we need to spend more money in over-designed shell and tube heat exchangers and then operate them under sub-optimal conditions?

With TEMA fouling factors in place, there is no need for further safety margin. 20% more flow can easily be pushed through a heat exchanger since the necessary hydraulic buffer is usually available in the system. For engineers who still like to be conservative, providing 10% margin on the calculated surface area is a better option than designing with 10% margin on the flow.

Bio-fuels

2008-02-18T22:49:00.002+05:30

Over the weekend I was scouring the Internet for ideas to construct a meaningful syllabus on bio-fuels, an elective for the proposed ME programme in Chemical Engineering that I had suggested at the Board of Studies meeting last Monday. The result was both educative and entertaining. Here is a sample:

Three types of bio-refinery and their principles

Making bio-diesel at home

But this photo takes the cake. Can’t believe that they market bio-diesel like this in USA.

EPC Business Strategy – People, Process and Partnerships

2008-02-06T22:02:00.000+05:30

My article published in the Annual Issue of Chemical Industry Digest

Currently the EPC industry is in turmoil, confronted as it is with an extraordinary situation – too much work but too few hands. There has been a slew of grassroots and expansion projects in the refining and petrochemical sector especially in the Middle East. Concomitant with this the industry is facing a severe dearth of qualified engineers. This state of affairs is likely to continue, if not get worse, for some more years with several big projects in the pipeline. This article presents some stray thoughts on how the industry can cope with this extraordinary situation.

Engineering Process

Engineering design has been transformed radically over the last decade by a suite of smart software. These tools have made engineering design less tiresome and more efficient. Plant design is now faster and more accurate. Claims of 20-30% reduction in engineering efforts are not far-fetched. Though many EPC companies have been quick to embrace these tools, the integration has not been wholehearted and complete. The remnants of the old traditional methods linger.

The new suite of software has subtly changed the rules of engineering design. The current mantra is one-time data entry. For example, P&I Diagrams are no longer drawings with bits and pieces of information; they have been transformed into a database represented pictorially. A corresponding change in mindset is necessary to derive full benefit from these tools, which are built around the principle of collaborative working, wherein different engineering disciplines are given access to the same document to do their part. The traditional regimented method in which each engineering discipline fiercely guards its territory has to be dismantled. Engineering design today has to be seamless in the true sense of the word and the old workflow practices need to be re-constructed to suit the new toolbox. Time and effort need to be invested to train engineers in the effective use of these tools if their features have to be exploited fully.

People Power

EPC business needs engineers with certain unique skill sets:

Writing specifications
Evaluating vendor’s quotations and preparing technical bid analysis
Reviewing vendor drawings
Document management

Also Piping Engineering does not exist as a discipline outside of EPC industry. Hence recruiting new talent from other industries, especially at middle level yields only average results. EPC firms have no option but to recruit fresh engineers and groom them, but are facing very high rate of exodus to other lucrative pastures. New recruits have to be put through a rigorous training programme, both class-room and on job, before they can be brought up to productive levels, a process that can take anywhere between 12-18 months. After investing so much cost and time in training, the high attrition rate is killing.

Since the intake of projects is not uniform, EPC firms cannot go for annual campus recruitment in a big way. Borrowing the example from other professions, a cluster of EPC firms should come together to establish a 2-year post-graduate certificate course in EPC Engineering / Management. This will not only allow the high training costs to be shared amongst the participating firms but will also create a large talent pool into which companies can dip as per their yearly needs. Integrating these students into the taskforces will not only provide them the crucial on job training but would also improve the bulge-mix of the team and thus lower the costs.

Taskforce Organisation

Engineering for most medium and large sized projects is today carried out in taskforces. Within the taskforce work should be optimally carved out into meaningful ‘Design Areas’ that can be conveniently managed by ‘Area Engineers’, such that concurrent engineering is possible. By dividing the work between multiple geographical locations, time differences can be smartly leveraged to create a virtual 24x7 engineering office.

Engineering design is no rocket science and does not call for application of sophisticated technical skills, but what is not often appreciated is that it needs engineers with an extraordinary set of soft skills. Much of detailed engineering is an irritatingly iterative process. The engineers and designers start off with half baked information, making several assumptions and guess-estimates. As the information and data keep getting refined during the engineering process, designers need to frequently revisit and rework their design. This can get tiresome and sap the morale of even the most committed engineer. Momentum and motivation get easily mired. Out of the box thinking and risk taking abilities are important attributes that need to be encouraged and nourished, without fear of punishment. EPC companies have traditionally shied away from professionally qualified Project Managers and have relied on engineers who have risen through the ranks to don the mantle of leadership. More than possessing the required technical competence, the Project Manager should be a mentor, a coach and a father figure who can manage the fragile egos of the team members; someone who can bring joy and fun to the workplace.

Today’s EPC business demands engineers with cross-functional skills. Process engineers cannot afford to work within the confines of their idealistic cocoon and need to have a strong understanding of the ramifications of their actions on downstream engineering, especially piping. Similarly piping engineers need to empathize with their counterparts in civil and structural engineering. Organisations need to discover engineers with such potential and groom them assiduously. As this promises career growth, it will help in retaining talent. A team made up of such engineers will have less friction and high morale, work more efficiently and give better output.

The composition and leadership of the taskforce are central to the success of any EPC project. While most engineering is executed within the taskforce, some crucial support functions are shared amongst many taskforces. In order to set meaningful targets and foster accountability, taskforces should be fully self-contained requiring no external support whatsoever. Fully empowered teams managed by an empathizing leadership can achieve outstanding results. Taking a leaf from the world of advertising and IT industry, team members should be handsomely rewarded on achieving targets. And like in sports, successful teams should not be disbanded, but retained for other projects.

Partnership with Vendors

The timely receipt, completeness and accuracy of vendor information are absolutely crucial to engineering. It usually takes 10 to 12 weeks between floating an enquiry and order placement. Vendors take anywhere between 4 to 8 weeks after order to submit the relevant drawings and documents. This procurement cycle has a big impact on the engineering schedule. It is important to integrate the vendor into the project plans. This is easier said than done, since the vendors’ priorities are different from those of the project.

Vendors prepare documents and drawings to suit their own fabrication and manufacturing schedule which rarely if ever coincides with that of piping and civil engineering requirements for project. Vendors also need information, like nozzle orientation, from the EPC contractor for meeting their committed delivery schedules. Penalties and Liquidated Damages are often built into the Purchase Orders, but they rarely help because most vendors factor this into their pricing. On the other hand bonuses for better performance could just be the right tonic. It is a complex and challenging problem and building medium to long term partnerships with ‘preferred’ vendors would go a long way to ease some of these bottlenecks. A meaningful partnership would facilitate engineering due to

Familiarity with each other’s requirements, expectations and practices
Shorter enquiry to order cycle
Advance information for engineering
Fewer deviations during execution
Shorter drawing review time
Flexibility to accommodate last minute changes
Mutual respect and trust

Such partnerships can be established for ‘information heavy’ items like rotating equipment, control valves, safety valves, motors etc. Since the ‘preferred’ vendors are more or less assured of a steady stream of orders, this is a win-win situation for both parties and such a partnership should not pinch the contractor. This concept should however be explained upfront to the client, who must be taken into confidence.

Site Engineering

While quality is important in every human endeavour, it must be recognised that improvement in quality cannot come without expending additional time and costs. Also important is the need to appreciate that principles of quality cannot be applied with the same rigour in a service industry as in a manufacturing set-up. The quality issues with a set of engineering deliverables cannot be as life threatening as that with a batch of antibiotics. Incremental improvements in quality of engineering deliverables take a disproportionately long time. The same yardsticks of quality cannot be applied indiscriminately to projects of all kinds. Almost always errors of omission and commission in engineering deliverables can be spotted and rectified at site by the ingenuity of site engineers without too much damage. Engineering support at site to ‘refine’ the quality of engineering deliverables would save both time and cost of engineering in the home office. Excessive obsession with quality of deliverables not only adds up time and cost, but also saps the morale of the engineers. Clients should be taken into confidence on this sensitive point and an agreement must be reached at the beginning of the project.

Outsourcing

Outsourcing is a very useful and cost effective method of overcoming the resource and time crunch. It must be judiciously used though to avoid running into quality problems. Some examples of tasks that can be outsourced are thermal design of heat exchangers, hazardous area classification drawings, noise mapping, review of vendor drawings, preparation of detailed civil drawings etc. Several avenues of outsourcing are available ranging from professionally organized agencies to individuals working as freelancers. Close monitoring is necessary while outsourcing work to agencies to ensure that compatible software, standards and engineering practices are adopted. Thanks to the Internet, exchange of documents is much faster and more reliable. One resource that is not fully tapped into is the senior professionals who have retired after a long stint in the industry. They can be effectively deployed as checkers and also as advisors.

Summary

A winning strategy for EPC business should hinge around:

Reinventing engineering workflow
Empowered teams with empathizing leaders
Recruitment and Retention of key people
Partnership with vendors
Smart outsourcing

Vacuum System

2008-01-27T13:21:00.000+05:30

Last month I gave a lecture on Vacuum Systems at a two-day workshop organized under TEQIP Networking aided by World Bank at BATU, Lonere. Besides giving an overview on vacuum system design, my objective was also to compare the different alternatives available to produce vacuum. For this I prepared a ranking matrix as below:

	EJECTOR	LIQUID RING VACUUM PUMP	DRY VACUUM PUMP
Vacuum Level	1	3	2
Capacity	1	2	3
Reliability	1	2	3
Environment	3	2	1
Initial Cost	1	2	3
Operating Cost	3	2	1

KEY – 1 is the best rank.

Economic Considerations in Process Design and Engineering

2007-10-18T00:31:00.000+05:30

This is an extract of a lecture I delivered at the workshop on 'Chemical Engineering and Economics' organised on 13th October by the Lote Regional Centre of Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Of all the phases that a chemical plant project goes through from concept to commissioning, it is the design and engineering phase that offers the maximum scope and opportunities for economy.

Chemical plant design and engineering has three elements to it:

Safety
Reliability
Economy

Safety and reliability are not as easily quantifiable as economy. Economy in design should not be achieved at the cost of acceptable limits of safety and reliability.

Chemical plant design still continues to be governed by a large set of heuristics (rules of thumb). Unquestioning adherence to such heuristics can lead to uneconomic design. Depending on the situation heuristics and assumptions must be challenged by process engineers. Now that software have speeded up calculations, it would be worthwhile to examine several alternatives rather than rely on heuristics.

Chemical Engineering is largely an empirical science. Empirical correlations form the backbone of even the most sophisticated software for equipment design. Various physical and chemical properties that are required to be plugged into these correlations are not easily and accurately available, especially for mixtures. These are often predicted, extrapolated and even guess estimated. To account for these intrinsic uncertainties, a safety factor is often added.

Safety factors are also usually added to account for future expansion and as a cushion for fulfilling performance guarantees. Often factors get multiplied at the hands of several agencies, resulting in extreme over design.

There are also some hidden safety factors, for example

Roughness factor in pressure drop calculation
Fouling factor in heat exchanger design
Corrosion allowance

There is a mistaken notion that providing design margins improves the reliability of the equipment. Design margins are more often than not generously specified for heat exchangers and pumps and this not only results in higher cost but also leads to sub-optimal performance of the equipment.

Though firmly rooted in chemical engineering principles, the design of a chemical plant requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Through relocating, rearranging and reconfiguration of equipment, it is possible to reduce plant piping and save both capital and operating costs. Value Engineering is a systematic process designed to focus and improve upon the major elements of complex or high cost projects. It is a process that employs a multi-disciplinary team of experts to develop recommendations aimed at improving the value of a project during its design phase.

Static Electricity

2007-07-05T01:11:00.000+05:30

Static electricity is an omnipresent and insidious hazard in many chemical industries.To comprehend the threat posed by static electricity, it is necessary to understand the fluids that are being handled in the process. The ability of a fluid to retain an electrostatic charge depends on its electrical conductivity, and in this connection 50 pico siemens /cm (same as pico mhos/cm or Conductivity Units – C.U.) is the magic number that process engineers should remember. Fluids which have electric conductivity below 50 pico siemens /cm are called accumulators, and those having values above 50 are non-accumulators. In non-accumulators, charges combine as fast as they are separated and hence electrostatic charge generation is not significant. 50 pico siemens /cm is the recommended minimum value of electrical conductivity for adequate removal of charge from a fluid.

Another important term is relaxation time, which is calculated as 18 divided by electrical conductivity. Thus a fluid that has an electrical conductivity of 1 pico siemens /cm has a relaxation time of 18 seconds. 4 to 5 times the relaxation time is the time required to be given to a fluid for the charges to dissipate itself. 90 seconds for the fluid in this example.

Flow of poorly conducting hydrocarbon liquids at high velocities in pipelines is an important source of generation of static charges. This is more so with pipe diameters larger than 8 inches and not so much with smaller diameter pipelines. Static charge generation in such flow systems is best controlled by limiting the velocity. The British standard BS PD CLC/TR 50404:2003 (formerly BS-5958-Part 2) Code of Practice for Control of Undesirable Static Electricity recommends that the product of the velocity (in metres per second) and the pipe diameter (in metres) be less than 0.38 for liquids with conductivities of less than 5 pico siemens/m and less than 0.5 for liquids with conductivities above 5 pico siemens/m. The presence of water in the hydrocarbon makes a big difference and in this case the velocity should be limited to 1 m/sec.

Bonding and earthing are the usual ways by which charge separation can be prevented. For fluids with electrical conductivity below 10 pico siemens/cm, bonding and earthing are not adequate for charge dissipation. Antistatic additives would be required here.

FLUID	Electrical Conductivity (C.U.)
Highly Purified Hydrocarbons	0.001
Light Distillates	0.01 - 10
Jet fuel	150 - 300
Crude Oil	1000 – 100,000

Process engineers concerned with static electricity would do well to read any or all of the following standards:

BS PD CLC/TR 50404:2003 Code of Practice for Control of Undesirable Static Electricity
NFPA 77 (2007) Recommended Practice on Static Electricity
API RP 2003 (1998) Protection Against Ignitions Arising Out of Static, Lightning, and Stray Currents
OISD 110 (1999) Recommended Practices on Static Electricity

General overviews on the subject are available on the internet at

http://www.fiberglasstankandpipe.com/handlingpetrol.htm#I

http://www.osh.govt.nz/order/catalogue/pdf/staticelectricity.pdf

World Environment Day

2007-06-06T23:54:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, 5^th June was observed as World Environment day. While every denizen of this planet has to feel responsible for our environment, amongst the various professionals, the burden on Chemical Engineers is several notches higher. There are two reasons for this. Firstly the chemical and allied industries have the maximum potential to damage our environment. But let me state in the same breath that the chemical engineers are our best resources to counter and alleviate that threat.

Chemical industries are big consumers of water. Water is used for cooling, to raise steam, as a solvent, as a diluent, to backwash filters, for general purpose cleaning and it also takes part in some reactions. There are numerous opportunities to reduce water consumption for both designers and operators of chemical plants. However many of them are dismissed without a second look as being too trivial to warrant the investigative effort. Other serious contenders get shot down as not cost effective after a cursory analysis. The problem is that we don’t take water seriously enough. No effort is too much when it comes to saving water. Similarly many economic analysis are doomed because the cost of water is pegged at artificially low values.

Every Chemical Engineer worth his salt must perform a water balance of the plant he is designing or operating.

Following are some random ideas for reducing water consumption:

Use more air coolers to bring down cooling water requirement.
Use higher cycles of concentration in cooling water systems by adopting better treatment methods to prevent scaling.
Invest in filters which can handle more solids loading to reduce the backwashing frequency.
Fix leaking steam traps and valve glands immediately.

Here is hoping that every chemical engineer addresses issues of water conscientiously and with a conscience.

Control Valves - To Bypass or Not?

2007-05-14T00:34:00.000+05:30

While developing P&I D’s one question that often stares squarely in the eyes of a Process Engineer is ‘to bypass or not?’ I am referring to the provision of bypasses around the control valves. Control valves like any other piece of hardware can fail or malfunction and might have to be taken out for maintenance. Would the entire plant need to be shut down for that resulting in loss of production? Not if the intended control can be achieved by operation of a manual valve. When is manual control advisable? Here are some thoughts:

1) When manual operation is safe and would not lead to catastrophic damage of people and property due to operator error

2) Pressure is most difficult to control manually and Flow is least difficult. Level and Temperature would fall in between depending on the process dynamics.

3) Large valves are difficult to operate manually than smaller ones. There is no exact cut-off point, but it could be in the range of 8 to 12 inches.

So bypasses can be ruled out for

1) Control valves performing complex and critical functions that can never be entrusted to an operator.

2) Large size Control valves, say greater than 12 inches. (it should be noted that the size of the bypass valve is one or two sizes lower)

What is the option when bypass cannot be provided due to any of the above reasons? Providing two control valves in parallel could be a clumsy and expensive solution. Another way of looking at this is to procure a top quality control valve and ensure it’s all round availability through periodic preventive maintenance.

While searching the Internet for references on this topic, I came across these Guidelines for Application of Control Valves. Though it comes with a bold ‘Not for Commercial Use’ warning, the guidelines are a treasure trove of information about Control Valves. It is a Process Industry Practices (PIP) initiative with the objective of minimizing the cost of process industry facilities. More on PIP later.

Electrical Safety

2006-11-30T18:31:00.000+05:30

The environment in a chemical plant is often hazardous, especially when hydrocarbons are being processed and process engineers are called upon to specify or approve the protection method for electrical apparatus installed in hazardous areas. The first prerequisite for an explosion to occur is the presence of the flammable gas – air mixture in an explosive concentration and the atmosphere in a plant can be classified into 3 zones, depending on the likelihood of the hazard being present. The risk is highest in Zone 0, where the hazard is always present. In Zone 1 the risk is lower with the hazard likely to be present under normal operating conditions. The risk is least in Zone 2 with the hazard being present only for short times due to a fault. Guidelines are available in API RP 500 for constructing the Hazardous Area Classification diagram demarcating the plant environment into different zones for various commonly encountered situations.

For Zone 0 application, the only practical option is to adopt the principle of intrinsic safety. An intrinsically safe apparatus (Ex-i) is designed and constructed such that the electrical energy carried by the circuit, even under fault conditions, is lower than the minimum ignition energy of the flammable environment in which it has to operate.

For Zone 1 application there are plenty of options to choose from. In addition to intrinsic safety, the other choices are flameproof enclosures (Ex-d), increased safety (Ex-e) and purged or pressurized enclosures (Ex-p). Flameproof enclosures do not prevent ingress of flammable mixtures from outside, but are designed to withstand an internal explosion and the flame that leaps out of the enclosure is cooled before it reaches the potentially inflammable atmosphere outside. Increased Safety design and construction ensures that there is no arcing, sparking or hot surface that can be a source of ignition. Pressurization of the enclosure by purging it with clean air or inert gas is another way of rendering it non-hazardous. For Zone 2 application, there is one more protection possibility, Ex-n which prevents ignition by avoiding sparks or hot surfaces during normal operation.

Ex-i is the highest level of protection followed by Ex-d and Ex-e. Ex-p and Ex-n constitute the lowest rungs on the ladder. The type of protection to be applied depends on the application and of course on the zone in which the application falls. Cost and maintenance are also important considerations. Ex-i is the most expensive but offers the tremendous advantage of permitting live maintenance within the hazardous area and hence it is the most widely used method of protection for process instrumentation. Ex-e is usually applied for small motors, luminaries and junction boxes. Ex-p is the least expensive option, used typically for instrument enclosures, but also the least reliable because of possible purge failure.

Ex-d enclosure design depends on the type of explosive mixtures being handled, which are divided into 4 groups – I, IIA, IIB and IIC. Ex-d enclosures for Group – IIC gases (hydrogen) require stringent design and certification making them very expensive. Depending on the Zone, Ex-e or Ex-n are often specified for motors on hydrogen service to reduce the cost. The gas groups are important only selecting the right type of flameproof enclosure and are not relevant for other types of protection.

Sankey Diagram

2006-11-28T21:58:00.000+05:30

A picture is worth a 1000 words. Sankey Diagrams are attention grabbing flowcharts that help in quick visualisation of the distribution and losses of material and energy in a process. The width of the lines used in drawing the flowchart is proportional to the quantum of material or energy. The irish engineer Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey (1853 - 1921) was the first to use the volume proportional representation of energy flows to analyse the efficiency of steam engines.

The Sankey diagram is very convenient tool to represent energy flow in any equipment or system such as boilers, fired heaters, furnaces after carrying out energy balance calculation. This diagram represents visually various outputs and losses so that energy managers can focus on finding improvements in a prioritised manner. A Sankey Diagram is also a powerful tool to sell concepts and ideas within a group and to the top management. There are many software available in the market to help construct a Sankey Diagram.

Metathesis for Propylene

2006-11-27T22:56:00.000+05:30

Historically Propylene has been looked down upon as a byproduct of Ethylene during steam cracking of Naphtha and since Ethylene commanded a higher price, most crackers were configured to maximize the yield of the lower olefin, typically twice as much as Propylene. But this equation is fast changing. With growing applications of Polypropylene, Naphtha Crackers and Refinery FCCU’s are unable to cope up with the rising demand for Propylene. Many options to bridge this supply – demand gap are becoming attractive and one of them is Metathesis, which produces Propylene through a reaction between Ethylene and 2-butenes. Approximately 0.42 tons of Ethylene is required for every ton of Propylene.

Metathesis has been around for more than 3 decades now, but it has caught the eye only now. The first significant application of metathesis for Propylene production was designed by ABB Lummus Global and was commissioned by Lyondell Petrochemical in 1985. Lummus acquired the technology in 1997 and initiated an intense development program to optimize and broaden the technology. Earlier this month Petrochemical Corporation of Singapore’s Metathesis plant went on stream to produce 200,000 TPA Propylene. Metathesis is a term that is going to be increasingly talked about.

Catalysts & Synthesis

Technology & Flowsheet

Celebration of Chemical Engineering

2006-11-10T21:50:00.000+05:30

The curtains came down today on IndiaChem 2006, the 3-day trade fair of the Indian Chemical Industry organised by Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals, Government of India and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Probably for the first time we at Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers participated in a trade show of this type with the objective of popularising chemical engineering especially among the youth. Awareness of Chemical Engineering and IIChE was promoted through displays……

…………Impromptu lectures

And handouts of a CD titled ‘A Celebration of Chemical Engineering’

World Without Chemicals?

2006-11-09T23:41:00.000+05:30

Europe, the birthplace of many a chemical and the world’s largest chemical producer today, has discovered a new hate-filled dislike for chemicals. Chemicals which impact our daily lives in products from toothbrush to condom are soon going to be treated as poisons, through a draconian provision known by the angelic acronym of REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of Chemicals), which is poised to be adopted by the end of this year. Under REACH expected to come into force in April 2007, the onus of proving that a chemical is safe rests with the industry. This marks a paradigm shift from the present regime in which a chemical is deemed safe unless a public regulatory body proves it otherwise.

REACH would require manufacturers and traders to produce tons and tons of documentation and the Helsinki based European Chemical Agency (ECHA) will be responsible for the technical, scientific and administrative aspects of REACH. Industry is also required to withdraw chemicals that cannot be proved as benign and replace them with safer substitutes. Implementing REACH is not going to be cheap and it is estimated to cost the industry 5 million Euros over a ten year period. The prophets of doom ought to remember that the much maligned pesticide DDT saved millions of lives and was responsible for eradicating malaria from Europe and North America. A world without chemicals would not be worth living in!

Self-discipline better than being policed.

2006-11-03T23:47:00.000+05:30

The energy intensive chemical industry is out of the ambit of mandatory energy audits, at least for another two years. That was the most important take-home on day one of the two-day seminar on energy conservation organised by Indian Chemical Council. Under the Energy Conservation Act of 2001, 15 industries had been notified as Designated Consumers, chemical industry being one of them. It is mandatory for a Designated Consumer to appoint an Energy Manager, who is expected to develop and implement an Energy Management Plan, and Energy Audit by accredited Energy Auditors was part of that plan.

The reason being doled out for a new shortened list of Designated Consumers that excludes chemical industry from it is rather flimsy. The chemical industry, it is being argued, is far too diverse and disparate to evolve easy norms for benchmarking. How a two-year moratorium will help in making that arduous task any easier is anybody’s guess. But Energy Conservation is far too important an issue to be left to bureaucratic whims and fancies. The inability of supplies to cope with the growing hunger for energy is all too evident. The investments called for are mind boggling and in the short to medium term, energy conservation is the best bet to narrow the gap between supply and demand.

The crying need of the hour for the chemical industry is to discipline itself from within and not wait for it to be policed.

Fired Heater Design

2006-10-12T21:27:00.000+05:30

Design of fired heaters is complex and best left to specialists. But there are times when a rapid preliminary estimate is required, and it is then that the website HEATERDESIGN comes to the rescue. It not only provides a nice overview of the thermal and mechanical design considerations of a fired heater but also comes loaded with nifty online calculators. Though the expressed purpose of the website is educational and it comes with a clear warning that the methods presented may or may not be suitable for actual design, this does not take away the utility of the online calculators for:

Flue Gas Composition and Properties

Tube Wall Temperature

Heat Loss

Flame Temperature

Acid Dew Point of Flue Gas

Pressure Loss in Ducts

Stack Draft

......and much more

Fouling Factors

2006-10-11T21:14:00.000+05:30

While revamping a Chemical Process Plant, it is very rare to find a heat exchanger that is a bottleneck to achieve higher throughputs. In other words, heat exchangers more often than not have plenty of in-built design margins. This margin results from providing conservative fouling factors, in addition to the customary practice of designing heat exchangers for 110 % of the heat duty.

Consider the case of a simple condenser condensing organic vapours using cooling water in the tubes. For typical values of ho = 1000, hio = 400 and rd = 0.003 (all in British Units; Thanks to the pioneering text book of Kern, generations of chemical engineers are comfortable in British Units when it comes to heat transfer coefficients), the overall heat transfer coefficient U is 154. With improved treatment of cooling water and annual cleaning, it is possible to specify a less conservative dirt factor. With rd = 0.001, U leaps to 222, an increase of 44 %. Compounded with the 10 % design margin mentioned above, the heat exchanger has a margin of 58 %, good enough for most revamps.

There were times when conservative fouling factors were specified to hide the perceived inadequacies of empirical calculation methods and likely errors in physical properties. But with sophisticated software of HTRI and HTFS, which model the non-ideal flows on the shell side, estimates of clean heat transfer coefficients are more accurate. The case for conservatism in fouling factors no longer exists on this count.

Over sizing of heat exchangers can also be counterproductive. Lower velocities in an oversized exchanger will only promote scaling and accelerate fouling. The research work on fouling is scattered and not much has been done in compiling a meaningful database that can be used to choose economic fouling factors for cost-effective design of heat exchangers. Last year HTRI launched an industry-wide effort to examine the way heat exchangers are designed.

Pitting Resistance

2006-10-11T00:03:00.000+05:30

Stainless Steels are vulnerable to corrosion by pitting. Higher the concentration of Chromium (Cr), Molybdenum (Mo) and Nitrogen (N) better the resistance to pitting. The Pitting Resistance Equivalent (PRE) Number is a good quantitative guide of resistance to pitting.

PRE = (%Cr) + (3.3x%Mo) + (16 x %N)

Higher the PRE Number, better the resistance.

Processing the Passion.

2006-10-09T22:10:00.000+05:30

Last Saturday I delivered a lecture on ‘The Art of Process Design and Engineering’ at a Tech Fest organized by the Chemical Engineering students of Thadomal Shahani Engineering College, Bandra. While conluding the nearly three hour long talk, I enumerated the following minimum essential skills required of a good Process Engineer

• Understanding Chemistry
• Knowledge of Fluids and Materials
• Grasping the Principles of Flow
• Loads of Commonsense
• Feel for Numbers

Nanotechnology has clearly caught the fancy of young chemical engineers. Out of the 9 papers presented at the technical session, that I had the opportunity to judge, 4 were on Nanotechnology. Students used eye-catching visuals and made their presentations very confidently. But sadly the depth was lacking. Perhaps we should have debates rather than conventional presentations, in order to foster creative reasoning.

The excitement at the fest was however very palpable. The passion with which the students participated is encouraging for the future of Indian Chemical Engineering.

Life Savers

2006-10-05T23:44:00.000+05:30

Rules of Thumb are life savers for Process Design Engineers.

Here are two excellent resources for Rules of Thumb freely available on the Internet

Heuristics in Chemical Engineering - Stanley M Walas

Experienced-Based Rules of Chemical Engineering

After this who needs computers?

News to Cheer !

2006-10-04T21:23:00.000+05:30

Padmasree Warrior, Executive VP/Chief Technology Officer at Motorola has been included in Fortune magazine’s latest list of most powerful businesswomen. She is a chemical engineer with MS from Cornell University and a B.Tech from IIT - Delhi. She also has the distinction of becoming the first woman chief technology officer in the US. Now that is some news to cheer for Chemical Engineers, women and Indians in that particular order.

A New Curriculum?

2006-10-02T23:33:00.000+05:30

It is Vijayadashami today and millions of Indians renew their oaths towards their trade and profession. And here is my bit towards my profession of chemical engineering.

The Board of Studies in Chemical Engineering, Mumbai University met last month to discuss restructuring of the syllabus for the undergraduate programme. As one of the two representatives from industry on this Board, I am often asked to suggest design and simulation software that should be included in the curriculum, so as to make it relevant for the industry. The curriculum today places more emphasis on application oriented courses like process engineering and process simulation at the expense of principle based subjects like fluid flow and heat transfer, in the mistaken belief that these produce more ‘industry-friendly’ students.

Universities should not sweat about tailoring their chemical engineering curriculum to meet the needs of a specific industry or business. What industry needs are engineers firmly grounded in chemical engineering principles and fundamentals, who can then be moulded to meet the specific requirements. Many Chemical Engineers would be applying a lot of fluid flow and heat transfer principles throughout their career and during our recruitment we test fresh candidates mostly on their knowledge in these two areas and they fare rather poorly on this. Process Simulation has lots of glamour value and everyone yearns for it. Instead of succumbing to the pressures of including this in the UG programmes, time and energy can be gainfully invested in the underlying principles of chemical engineering thermodynamics.

Seminar, Safety and Serendipity

2006-09-30T21:57:00.000+05:30

September saw a surfeit of events and programmes – Students CHEMCON and IIChE Council Meeting at Anantapur, CHEMCON 2006 NOC Meeting, Investiture ceremony of Student Chapter at Datta Meghe College of Engineering, Meeting of the Board of Studies in Chemical Engineering of the Mumbai University and last but not least the workshop on Process Development and Scale-up in Fine Chemical Industry at Chiplun.

As one of the architects of the Chiplun workshop I was excited by three features –
the collaborative efforts between two regional centres of IIChE (Mumbai and Lote)
the interaction between academia and industry and
the customer driven content

Seminars and symposia can be a big let-down if you peg your expectations high. I look for one technical take-away and more importantly look forward to network with other professionals. One of the more interesting presentations at this workshop examined the safety considerations in scaling up reactions from laboratory to commercial plant. It had serendipitous moments for me.

Here are two resources which capture that content and excitement

A Checklist for Inherently Safer Chemical Reaction Process Design and Operation

Chemical Reaction Engineering for Safety

Is Insulation Corrosion Proof?

2006-09-29T19:23:00.000+05:30

If you are among those engineers who think that insulation, apart from energy conservation, also gives protection against external atmospheric corrosion, then you are wrong. Poorly specified and wrongly installed insulation can corrode even stainless steel. Corrosion under insulation is a major cause for concern in contributing to unexpected failures. Corrosion takes place unnoticed under the seemingly perfect insulation and eventually leads to a sudden failure.

Austenitic stainless steels are susceptible to chloride induced stress corrosion cracking (SCC) at temperatures above 65 0C. Since chlorides can ingress along with water through insulation, insulated austenitic stainless steel surfaces are vulnerable to SCC. Insulated austenitic stainless steel surfaces operating at temperatures above 65 0C should have protective coating. Further, chloride free (< 10 ppm) insulating materials are recommended for this application. Duplex stainless steels have a high resistance to SCC and do not require external coating.

Materials most vulnerable to corrosion under insulation are ferritic steels operating in the range of -10 0C to 120 0C. Special attention is required for equipment and piping that operate below the atmospheric dew point.

Corrosion under insulation can be prevented through good insulation practices. Installation of good weatherproofing absolutely must. Further these should be properly and periodically maintained. Yet small quantities of moisture will sneak in through the insulation and to guard against this corrosion, a protective paint is recommended under the insulation.

Enhancing Engineering Education

2006-09-28T23:29:00.002+05:30

Seven IIT's and IISc Bangalore have come together to enhance the quality of engineering education in the country by developing video and web based courses under the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning funded by the Ministry of HRD. The contents of these courses have now been made available on a website for a broader audience. There are about 70 courses on the menu, but no chemical engineering courses as yet.

Oil Mist Lubrication

2006-09-27T21:43:00.000+05:30

Oil Mist Lubrication improves the reliability of pumps and machinery by several notches through reduced bearing failures and improved mechanical seal life. There are other benefits too including a 40 % saving in lube oil consumption. Why then is it not catching on? Lack of knowledge perhaps.

Guidelines for Oil Mist Lubrication

Concept and Best Practices

Case Studies

Five C's of Commissioning and The Making of a Complete Engineer

2006-09-26T22:34:00.000+05:30

Commissioning is a series of activities that culminates in the start-up of a plant. The activities of commissioning get underway when the plant has achieved Mechanical Completion, an important contractual milestone in the life of a project.

Commissioning engineers carry out the five checks for

1) Completeness (of the system)

2) Correctness (of the installation)

3) Cleanliness (to avoid contamination and choking)

4) Containment (to avoid leaks)

5) Calibration (of instruments and controllers)

Commissioning calls for not only technical but also man-management skills as engineers need to get the work done from contractor's and client's personnel. Comissioning engineers have to think out of their box and yet also display oodles of patience and perseverance.

Though commissioning needs special skill sets and attitudes, when the same team of engineers who have been involved in the design and engineering phases, commission the plant, it gives a tremendous feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment to the individuals concerned. It also ensures that the learnings at site are absorbed in the future projects. Commisioning makes an engineer complete.

Scale-up

2006-09-21T07:03:00.000+05:30

Scaling up a process from laboratory to pilot plant and further to commercial scale production is one of the most challenging and exciting subject for a chemical engineer, as it calls for in-depth understanding of chemical engineering principles and innovative out of the box thinking to translate a concept into reality. As we are organising a workshop this weekend on 'Process Development and Scale-up in Fine Chemical Industry', I am transported back to my classroom and seized by the excitement of it all over again. As I was browsing the Internet for some good reading material on scale-up, I was struck by the paucity of good free resources. But I came across this gem of an article on Scale up of liquid and semisolid manufacturing processes that points out some major obstacles to effective scale-up and describes methods available to pharmaceutical scientists for addressing scalability issues.

Popular Again?

2006-09-03T22:29:00.000+05:30

From England comes a piece of news that should warm the hearts of chemical engineers – the number of students enrolling into chemical engineering courses in UK have increased by 9 % this year. According to IChemE, chemical engineering is fast becoming a more popular choice for young adults entering higher education compared with other mainstream science and engineering disciplines. But here in India, the scenario continues to be gloomy, with chemical engineering languishing as the bottom of the barrel choice for engineering aspirants.If the promised investment blitz in petrochemical projects materialises in the next five years, we could be in for some serious shortage of skilled chemical engineers. It is time for all of us to take some pre-emptive initiatives

Seven Steps to Specifications

2006-08-08T23:11:00.000+05:30

A major task of FEED is to put together specifications for various equipment, systems and facilities that go into the plant. Here are seven steps to construct a meaningful specification:

•Duty
•Design Conditions
•Codes and Standards
•Scope
•Inspection, Testing & Documentation
•Guarantees
•Spares

FEED

2006-08-07T23:03:00.000+05:30

Until very recently, the life cycle of a CPI project followed the familiar well trodden path of Technology Selection, Basic Engineering and Detailed Engineering followed by the process of implementation and start-up. This comfortable situation has been rudely disrupted of late by a new activity called Front End Engineering and Design, known more popularly by the acronym FEED. In the earlier days the inadequacies of Basic Engineering, and there were a surfeit of them, were taken care of by the Detailed Engineering contractor. These inadequacies were primarily because the project owner (the client) would rather pay the local DEC for the touching up than pay through the nose to get a ‘perfect’ Basic Engineering Package (BEP) from overseas. But with projects increasingly being bid on a Lump Sum Turn Key (LSTK) basis, the BEP cannot be incomplete, inconsistent or inadequate. The main purpose of FEED is thus to flesh out the BEP into a level so that the LSTK bids can be obtained in the shortest possible time.

More on Hazop…..

2006-08-02T23:50:00.000+05:30

For Hazop to be effective and interesting it is necessary to deconstruct the P&I D’s carefully into the right number of NODES. Nodes have to be meaningfully and logically selected. Making the node too big in order to save time will be counterproductive as analysis will be frustrating. Too many nodes will end up trivializing the Hazop. It is useful to have one parameter, say flow, or temperature, or pressure unchanged in the Node.

Hazop software takes out the drudgery from recording the observations in long hand and nothing more. The constant ‘cut and paste’ may take out the drudgery but also dulls the mind. There is a danger of repetitive and monotonous thinking.

Thoughts on HAZOP

2006-08-01T22:29:00.000+05:30

I am posting after a long hiatus (blogging is for me the most difficult task to get myself motivated). After a long time I had an opportunity to be the Chairman of a Hazop Study and the excitement and satisfaction of that experience is substantially responsible for reviving this blog, and for which I have selected some random thoughts on Hazop.

Hazop Study, in addition to a review of the HAZARD and OPERABILITY of the process also serves two other important purposes:
•It offers an excellent learning session in Process Design and Engineering for rookie engineers of the EPC Company.
•It provides an excellent refresher course for the client’s operating personnel.
Both these are possible if the client participates in the process with great gusto, which unfortunately is not always the case. Many clients are content with the EPC Company carrying out the review on their own and are only interested in the getting the report that has to be furnished to bodies like the Factory Inspectorate for obtaining the required statutory approval. In this way an important learning opportunity is squandered away.

Hazop is a clinical and structured investigation of the P& I Diagram. This is done by examining each line and equipment or a cluster of lines and associated equipment, termed as ‘NODE’ (I prefer the nodal approach as it is far more elegant than the line approach) for deviation from the intent. This deviation is discovered by using a set of ‘GUIDE WORDS’ originally proposed by ICI and later augmented by others. Against each deviation, the CAUSE, CONSEQUENCE and SAFEGUARDS have to be recorded. It looks simple, but quite often engineers tend to confuse these three apparently simple concepts and this is where the stewardship of the Hazop Chairman is needed.

Another common pitfall is that many engineers discover the ‘safeguard’ first and jump to the conclusion that the ‘cause’ and the ‘consequence’ are unlikely. Here again the Chairman has to intervene and force the team to think through the process sequentially and hierarchically. The ‘cause’ for the deviation is not always easily apparent. If after some brainstorming the team fails to discover the ‘cause’ it is prudent to drop the deviation from further analysis. ‘Consequence’ is either an undesirable event or an excursion of the process parameters. ‘Safeguards’ can be of two kinds:
•a measure which prevents the ‘cause’ event
•a measure which detects or mitigates the consequence

The following would qualify as ‘safeguards’
•Alarms
•Interlocks and plant shut-downs
•Standby equipment
•Safety valves
•Appropriate choice of design pressure, temperature and material of construction

Some gray areas always crop up during every Hazop. These pertain to the maintainability, availability and reliability of the hardware, and are a separate subject in itself.

Reflections on Nanotechnology

2006-05-26T22:40:00.000+05:30

A preponderance of youth among the audience was the most conspicuous feature of the two-day symposium on nanotechnology held at the sylvan campus of TIFR in the southern most tip of Mumbai. Jointly hosted by the Mumbai and Baroda chapters of the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Indian Science Congress Association the seminar presented interesting food to chew upon in the emerging area of nanosciences and nanotechnology. Actually the concept underlying nanotechnology is not all that new as the hype enveloping it would lead us to believe. It probably date backs to the time when man realised the power and potency of things small and tiny. Thus artists in 10th Century used gold specks in their paintings to impart certain lustre. Practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine used bhasmas containing gold and silver dust, probably as carriers of medicine. Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathic system that relied on the potency of drug in small dosages can also be regarded as a manifestation of nanoscience.

Biotechnology - Future of Chemical Engineering?

2006-05-17T23:51:00.000+05:30

Chemical Engineers, espeically those in their 20's would do well to get a working knowledge of the biological and biochemical processes.

The Promise of Biotechnology

2006-05-16T23:44:00.000+05:30

ACHEMA this year has a special focus on Biotechnology. Biotechnology promises to revolutionise chemical process industry through:
a) use of renewable raw materials for large scale production of chemicals
b) use of biological processes for synthesis and manufacture of chemicals

Web Resources

A Basic Primer on Bioinformatics, Genome Mapping, Molecular Modeling etc.

Glossary of Biotechnology Terms

ACHEMA 2006

2006-05-15T19:26:00.000+05:30

The 28th International Exhibition-Congress on Chemical Engineering, Environmental Protection and Biotechnology has got underway in Frankfurt am Main and will last until 19th May.
DEHEMA, the organisers of ACHEMA have brought out 20 'TREND REPORTS' on topics ranging from Pumps and Compressors to Separation Tehnologies and Nanotechnology

Some other interesting topics are - Process Intensification, Energy Concepts, Industrial Biotechnology, Water Technolgies

A complete listing of the topics is available at TREND REPORTS

Layered Bed Ion-Exchange Systems

2006-05-09T23:50:00.000+05:30

A New Standard for Pumps

2006-05-04T23:38:00.000+05:30

Centrifugal pumps are the workhorses of the chemical process industry and chemical engineers in the industry devote a big chunk of their time in specifying, operating and troubleshooting this vital piece of equipment. Pumps account for 20% of the total world electric energy demand. Also of the total pump cost, only 5% accounts for capital cost, 10% for maintenance and up to 85% for energy consumption. Energy consumption in pumping can be lowered through
•selecting higher efficiency pumps
•selecting a better sized pump
•improved installation and maintenance
•improved system design and improved system control

Centrifugal pumps used in petroleum and petrochemical industry are specified, built and tested as per API - 610, the de-facto industry standard. Though this standard is largely the domain of mechanical engineers, chemical engineers will profit from having an overview of the various provisions. The current 10th edition came into vogue in October 2004 and is equivalent to ISO 13709. An article explaining the various changes from the earlier widely used 8th edition is very instructive.

Web Resources

Pump Magazine - Online Source of Information on Pumps

Titanium Troubles

2006-05-03T21:15:00.000+05:30

Project managers shopping for titanium capital goods are sweating. The lead times are far too long and prices are way above estimates. Suppliers of Plate Heat Exchangers in titanium are quoting ridiculous deliveries of 15+ months.
Titanium has always been an expensive metal, not because it is scarce - it is actually the ninth most abundant element on earth's crust - but due to the high cost of its extraction and manufacturing.
The current problems stems from a huge demand by the aerospace industry. In the next 15 years the number of commercial aircrafts are expected to jump three-fold to 30,000. Responding to the growing fuel costs, new generation aircrafts like Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 are using more titanium than ever before to bring down the weight. Each A380 will use 65 tonnes of titanium. It is mainly used in gas turbine components like compressor blades and also in airframe structures like landing gear etc.
The increasing Russian state control over VSMPO-Avisma, the world's largest producer of titanium, is also adding to the market pressures. Prices have hit a 20-year high of US$ 27/kg.
Titanium has the highest strength-to-density ratio of any metal. It also possesses superior corrosion resistance, making it an excellent choice of material for aggressive chemical environments. The present situation, if it continues is likely to put the metal out of reach for the non-aerospace consumers, especially the chemical industry.
Low cost techniques to extract and manufacture the metal and fabricate various components out of it are under varying stages of development. The sooner they are commercialised, the better it is for the industry.
Chemical Engineers have two challeneges before them:
1) To bring down the cost of titanium by developing alternative routes for extraction and manufacture of the metal.
2) To develop an economical alternative for titanium, for use in chemical industry applications.

Web Resources

The Titanium Information Group

International Titanium Association

TITAN Association

Japan Titanium Society

Titanium Metals Corporation

Titanium Industries, Inc.

Titanium Manufacturing Process & Products

Membranes

2006-05-02T23:26:00.000+05:30

Meeting with some like-minded professionals over lunch to form a professional body for Membrane Science and Technology.

Why this name?

2006-05-01T23:17:00.000+05:30

I am a Chemical Engineer by education. But having spent all my professional life so far in conceiving, specifying, selecting, sizing, designing, engineering, commissioning and troubleshooting equipment and systems for Chemical Process Industry, I would like to be known as a ‘Process Engineer’. Why then the name ‘Molecular Engineering’ for this blog?

The first and most obvious reason is that ‘chemical engineering’ and suitable variations of it were not available to me on this blog site. I chose ‘Molecular Engineering’ to convey my conviction that the happenings at the molecular level should be very close to the heart of every chemical engineer. Fundamental frameworks and concepts of Physics, Chemistry and Biology rule the chemical engineer’s world, but couched as they are in mathematical equations and formulae for practical applications, it is only the latter that is evident to many, especially now that rigorous and sophisticated computational techniques are easily available and affordable. Of all the engineering disciplines, it is Chemical Engineering that unarguably has the strongest roots in science.

There is yet another reason for choosing this name. Many universities in USA are in the process of reinventing their chemical engineering courses. Chemical engineering no longer has the charm and charisma bestowed on it in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The prefix ‘chemical’ is indeed a burden today, caused no doubt by unashamedly misinformed campaigns by vested interests who are turning a blind eye to the immense benefits that have accrued to society from chemicals – polymers and pharmaceuticals, to take just two examples would be inconceivable without chemical intermediates. Fortunately Life Sciences with its myriad branches has explosively opened up new frontiers for chemical engineers to forge ahead and reinvent themselves. It is back to the roots – molecules – again for Chemical Engineers.

Introduction

2006-04-30T20:47:00.000+05:30

Today is Akshay Trithiya, a day considered as very auspicious by many Indians. A good day for making new investments, for entering into new patrnerships, for starting new ventures. So it ought to be good enough for me to start this blog.
This blog is about the exciting practice and profession of Chemical Engineering which has contributed so much to enhancing the quality of our lives on this planet.