Steam traps have been around for a hundred years or so, and for the most part, nothing revolutionary has come forward to change the basic way a trap functions. Any operation that uses steam to produce a high-quality,…
A wake-up call for plant maintenance The new Simatic Teleservice Adaptor IE (photo) facilitates cost-effective remote maintenance of machinery and plants. In acute service cases or emergencies, an email can be sent via the device. The engineer then…
An expansion of Invensys’s (Foxboro, Mass.; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6891-532) recent InFusion launch (CE, May 2006, p. 13), the InFusion Condition Manager provides a new capability for effectively balancing asset availability and utilization to align overall plant performance with business objectives. Other vendors’…
Wireless communication for plant data gathering and even process control is a rapidly maturing technology. What started out as a cheap way to gather non-critical plant information now has the potential to take over much of the work…
The World Batch Forum (WBF; St. Louis, Missouri; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6891-542) has released new versions of its two, XML-based markup languages for implementing the ANSI/ISA S88 and S95 standards and their international countrerparts IEC-61512 and IEC/ISO-62264. Enhancements in Version 2.0 of WBF’s…
It’s a very exciting time for computational chemistry, said Gerhard Engel, senior director of R&D, accelrys Ltd. (Cambridge, England) in his opening address to delegates of the European Science Forum last month in Heidelberg, Germany. This comment was…
Samson AG (Frankfurt, Germany; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6891-545) has started to implement the Vigilant Integration Partners (VIP) initiative, having entered a formal cooperation agreement with Yokogawa Electric Corp. (Tokyo; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6891-546). The VIP initiative is an open and non-exclusive mutual technology cooperation program to…
Predicting an adiabatic-temperature rise is useful to chemical engineers for a number of purposes. One use is with combustion reactions whereby it is useful for determining the adiabatic-flame temperature. The adiabatic-temperature rise can be calculated for any reaction…
Despite its potential to affordably reach valuable, non-critical data that would otherwise be out of physical or economic reach, wireless technology has yet to be widely adopted in the chemical process industries (CPI) because of the significant upfront resources that…
Acro 1.0 optimization software, developed by Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, N.M.; edlinks.chemengonline.com/6518-550), has recently been published and is now available to the public at no charge. The software can be used to answer questions such as: “How will a drug…