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Facts At Your Fingertips

Facts At Your Fingertips: NFPA 652 and Dust Hazards Analyses

The National Fire Protection Association’s (NFPA; Quincy, Mass.; www.nfpa.org) NFPA 652 (Standard on the Fundamentals of Combustible Dust) creates a single, unified combustible-dust standard that applies to “all facilities and operations that manufacture, process, blend, convey, repackage, generate, or handle…

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Facts At Your Fingertips: Evaporator Equipment Types

Industrial evaporator heat-transfer surfaces are either tubular or flat plates, packaged into a variety of evaporator types, as outlined here. Batch evaporators Batch evaporators are vessels with a heating jacket or internal coil, an overhead condenser, a condensate receiver, and…

Facts At Your Fingertips: Microbial-Influenced Corrosion

Any corrosion process in which microorganisms initiate, facilitate or accelerate corrosive chemical reactions is termed microbially influenced corrosion (MIC). MIC occurs when the chemical, microbiological and physical conditions allow the active growth of biofilms containing specific types of microbes on…

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Facts at your Fingertips: Thermal Oxidizer Selection

Thermal oxidizers are pollution-control units designed to prevent process-generated volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from entering the environment. Different technologies offer tradeoffs among initial cost, operating expense, complexity, emissions, fuel efficiency and destruction efficiency. This one-page reference provides information on selecting…

Facts at your Fingertips: Temperature and Rupture Disk Burst Pressure

Rupture disks are non-reclosing pressure-relief devices that protect vessels, such as reactors, from damaging over-pressurization (or vacuum) conditions. Temperature can affect rupture-disk burst pressures in ways that users should understand before ordering them (Figure 1). This one-page reference provides an…

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Facts at your Fingertips: Nickel-based Superalloys

Superalloys, also known as high-performance alloys, are considered as materials of construction for process equipment in applications involving high temperatures, highly corrosive environments and those requiring high strength properties. Many commonly used superalloys in the chemical process industries (CPI) use…

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Facts At Your Fingertips: Hydrogen flame hazards and leak detection

The use of molecular hydrogen is common across the chemical process industries (CPI). Annually, 70 million metric tons of H2 are produced worldwide. Most industrial H2 production currently occurs via steam reforming of methane, but production via water electrolysis is…

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Facts At Your Fingertips: Roof Classifications of Atmospheric Storage Tanks

Storage tanks that are freely vented to the atmosphere are known as aboveground atmospheric storage tanks (ASTs). ASTs have a vertical cylindrical configuration and can be identified by the open vent nozzle on the tank roof. This one-page reference outlines…

Facts At Your Fingertips: Hopper Outlet Geometry and Arching

When transferring stored bulk-solids materials from hoppers, bins and silos, flow stoppage can occur because of bridging or arching at the vessel outlet. Hopper outlets must be large enough to prevent cohesive arches or stable ratholes from developing. Determining the…

Facts At Your Fingertips: Cost Estimation and Risk

Understanding project risks is critical to arriving at useful cost estimates. Since each capital project in the chemical process industries (CPI) is somewhat unique, it can be difficult for engineers and project leaders to price risks in their estimates and…