In obtaining a degree or even a professional license in chemical engineering, there is little, if any, mention of facial hair. Nevertheless, that aspect of my appearance was surprisingly pivotal at one particular moment in my career. At that time,…
Crystallization is a key purification technique for various sectors of the chemical process industries (CPI). Several approaches for industrial crystallization have evolved over time and highly specialized crystallizer designs have been developed, especially in long-established industries. Solution crystallization is an…
Every distillation engineer west of the River Neretva is familiar with the work of Professor Zarko Olujic. His distillation laboratory at the Technical University of Delft (The Netherlands; www.tudelft.nl) is one of the largest and best facilities in the history…
The deposition and accumulation of suspended and dissolved particles on membrane surfaces leads to performance loss. Fouling can dramatically reduce the efficiency and economic benefits of a membrane process. The type of fouling and how strongly it appears depends on…
Starting around 1970, many new contacting devices became available for use in distillation, absorption and stripping columns. Those devices included high-performance random packings, structured packings, high-capacity structured packings, augmented crossflow trays, counterflow trays and cocurrent flow trays. At the request…
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM; Halle, Germany; www.fraunhofer.de) have developed ceramic membranes with uniform pore structure and tight pore-size distribution, which makes them more stable and delivers considerably higher flowrates than existing ceramic membranes, which…
My first distillation dream occurred about 30 years ago, and yet, I recall it as vividly as if it were yesterday. In it, my distillation-column design work started with a vapor-liquid thermodynamic model that was widely regarded as perfect. I…
In 1952, 37 companies established Fractionation Research, Inc. (FRI). Most of those original members are now gone or absorbed by other companies. Nevertheless, their goal was to study distillation in columns having diameters and heights that were similar to industrial…
In a distillation column tray, vapor passes upward through liquid that is flowing across a horizontal perforated plate. Vapor passing through the perforated plate forms a two-phase mixture with the liquid and enables mass transfer contacting. This mixture is typically…
I have 70 supervisors. It sometimes feels like I am pulled in 70 different directions — north, south, east, west, up, down and inside-out. But even after two years at this job, I can still hold my hand steady —…