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Separation Processes

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Facts at your Fingertips: Filtration Process Design

Designing a new solid-liquid filtration process or optimizing an existing one requires consideration of a number of factors aside from the type of filter that will be used. This one-page reference reviews two groups of considerations: one related to equipment,…

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Liquid-Liquid Extraction: Generating Equilibrium Data

Equilibrium data and related information gathered from a liquid-liquid extraction laboratory “shake test” can provide information for process feasibility and column-type selection in the scaleup of liquid-liquid extraction processes Most chemical engineers have had the experience of dealing with problematic…

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Solvent-based process to recycle multilayered film

Later this year (Q4 2018), APK AG (Merseburg, Germany; www.apk-ag.de) will start up the first commercial plant to recycle multilayer packaging using the company’s solvent-based Newcycling process. The plant will process 8,000 metric tons per year (m.t./yr) of post-industrial multilayer…

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Solvent-free recovery of plant-based extracts

Plant-based extracts, such as antioxidants, phytochemicals and polyphenols, are used in a number of end-markets, including cosmetics, foods and nutritional supplements. A proprietary, low-polarity, pressurized-water extraction method is set to drastically improve the recovery of useful ingredients from botanical sources.…

Three reasons to measure pH in-line

  pH is a critical parameter in many aspects of production: from setting the conditions for a reaction to happen, to the management of the reaction’s process quality, and from sustaining process equipment integrity, to avoiding environmental pollution and health…

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Liquid-Gas Coalescers: The Effects of Retrograde Condensation

Modeling and pilot testing can minimize its impact during natural-gas processing Retrograde condensation (RC) occurs in multi-component natural-gas streams at relatively high pressures (for instance, pressures above 40 barg/580 psig). The presence of condensed liquids in such systems can have…

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Urban Mining Offers Good Prospecting

As the volume of discarded electronic gadgets grows, efforts are underway to recover the precious resources trapped inside It should come as no surprise that the fastest growing part of the world’s domestic waste stream is e-waste — discarded products…

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These highly selective membranes mimic biological ion channels

New membranes developed at Tufts University (Medford, Mass.; www.tufts.edu) can effectively separate similar chemicals based on not only size but on electrostatic charge. “Currently, there are no commercial membranes that are designed to separate organic molecules of similar size but…

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Startup for a demonstration plant to process three metals

Australian Mines (Perth; https//:australianmines.com.au) has started operating a demonstration three metals (cobalt-nickel-scandium) processing plant that will process ore from the company’s Sconi and Flemington projects into commercial-grade samples. The company’s flagship Sconi project, located in the mining center of Greenvale…

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Bubble-Cap Tray Vapor Turndown

The concept of tray stability can apply to bubble caps and be used as an alternative method to determine the minimum efficient capacity of these devices. A new stability correlation for bubble-cap trays is proposed and checked against FRI data…