Interesting engineering news and general interest to get you through the week. » Latest Engineering News » Chemical & ProcessChemical & Process Magic, jiggery pokery, whatever you want to call it, Chemical engineers can perform some truly amazing things. Keep up to speed on the latest news in this exciting area of engineering.
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Tar sands are a mixture of hydrocarbon-rich bitumen mixed in sandstone layers. When the hydrocarbons are separated, the bitumen released is a heavy, black and sticky semi-liquid of high viscosity. Today, SRI Consulting published its new Heavy Oil from Tar Sands report, a technical and economic analysis of production processes, capital and operating cost estimates, important issues that impact the industry, and key drivers for success and failure.
Author and Senior Consultant Anthony Pavone commented, "With rational engineering and prudent business decision making, grass roots tar sands projects should be economically viable at benchmark crude oil prices below US$60 a barrel."
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Friday 19 December, 2008 12:08 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Rose Shah
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Dow Chemicals International Pvt. Ltd ., the Indian arm of the $54 billion U.S.-headquartered multinational company, is betting big on making the engineering support centre in Chennai into a design hub for Dow across the globe. Indicating this in an interaction with The Hindu here on Wednesday, Ramesh Ramachandran, President and CEO, said the headcount at the Chennai centre would go up to 1,000 by 2010 from around 200 now.
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Thursday 18 December, 2008 08:02 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Ali Hamoud
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Masdar, an Abu Dhabi government initiative, owned by Mubadala Development Company, announced today the selection of Houston, Texas-based Mustang Engineering, a subsidiary of international energy services company John Wood Group PLC, to provide front-end engineering and design (FEED) services for Masdar’s Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project in the United Arab Emirates.
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Monday 1 December, 2008 12:08 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
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Air Products , a global leader in the production of industrial gases, is using its unique understanding of technical options for capturing greenhouse gases to collaborate with the Alberta Energy Research Institute (AERI) on a study focused on an advanced carbon dioxide capture technology for use with gasification. The advanced carbon capture technology, developed by Air Products, could reduce the cost of carbon dioxide (CO2) capture by up to 25 percent compared to current technologies. The study titled “Advanced Hydrogen and CO2 Capture Technology for Sour Syngas” is expected to be completed by October 2010.
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Tuesday 18 November, 2008 11:17 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Tony Elmasri
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SABIC Innovative Plastics is a leading, global supplier of engineering thermoplastics with a 75-year history of breakthrough solutions that solve its customers’ most pressing challenges. Today, SABIC Innovative Plastics is a multi-billion-dollar company with operations in more than 25 countries and over 10,500 employees worldwide. The company continues to lead the plastics industry with customer collaboration and continued investments in new polymer technologies, global application development, process technologies, and environmentally responsible solutions that serve diverse markets such as automotive, electronics, building & construction, transportation, and healthcare. The company’s extensive product portfolio includes thermoplastic resins, coatings, specialty compounds, film, and sheet.
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Monday 17 November, 2008 03:04 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Two major industry groups have been working together on a project to upgrade two cryogenic storage tanks in Ireland.
Leeds based Energy Services and Solutions (UK) (ESS), a division of the JFD Group of Companies has been working on the project for BOC, in Cork, to upgrade the integrity of two 300 ton capacity cryogenic storage tanks containing liquid nitrogen.
The tanks, primarily in use for bulk nitrogen supplies to hospitals and the pharmaceutical and electronics industries, are the property of BOC (part of the Linde Group), the largest supplier of gases and related products and services in the Republic of Ireland.
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Wednesday 12 November, 2008 08:14 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
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Foster Wheeler Ltd announced that its South African subsidiary, Foster Wheeler South Africa (Pty) Limited, part of its Global Engineering and Construction Group, has been awarded a front-end engineering design (FEED) contract by Sasol Chemical Industries Limited for the Sasolburg Fischer-Tropsch Wax Expansion Project in South Africa. The FEED is scheduled for completion in the second quarter of 2009.
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Wednesday 5 November, 2008 07:53 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Carbon Sciences Inc., the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into gasoline and other fuels, today announced that it anticipates the completion of a prototype that will demonstrate its innovative biocatalytic CO2 to fuel process by Q1 2009.
Other renewable fuel technologies such as those based on corn, sugarcane or palm seed require large amounts of energy and time to grow, process, and ferment the crops into fuel equivalents. Likewise, conventional chemical engineering approaches to creating fuel require immense energy due to high pressure and high temperature operating conditions, such as Fischer Tropsch processes.
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Monday 3 November, 2008 11:57 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Free-electron lasers consist of two fundamental components: an accelerator that produces high-energy electrons, and so-called ‘undulators' that send these electrons on a periodically curved path. The wiggling of the electrons along the path causes the emission of high-energy laser radiation through electro-magnetic interaction between the electrons and the radiation field.
Currently, x-ray FELs require large-scale electron accelerators of a few kilometers in length. It is important to reduce this length to enable the fabrication of cheaper FEL systems. The project team's compact FEL design of 55 m has produced a high-quality laser beam at the RIKEN Harima Institute.
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Saturday 1 November, 2008 12:34 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Susan Decker
“Many engineers and designers have only a limited knowledge of the breadth of surface technologies available to provide enhanced surface mechanical, chemical, optical, thermal, electrical, aesthetic, and other properties,” Dr. Tucker said. “Thermal spray is one of the most versatile of the surface engineering technologies, but needs to be considered in light of the others that are available when addressing a specific design or problem situation.”
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Wednesday 29 October, 2008 02:33 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by John William
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the U.S. ITER Project Office, which is housed at ORNL, have developed a new cast stainless steel that is 70 percent stronger than comparable steels and is being evaluated for use in the huge shield modules required by the ITER fusion device.
ITER is a multibillion-dollar international research and development project to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion power and to enable studies of self-heating burning plasmas. It will require hundreds of tons of complex stainless steel components that must withstand the temperatures associated with being in the proximity of a plasma heated to more than 100 million degrees Celsius.
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Monday 27 October, 2008 12:11 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by John Chadwick
Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a breakthrough in the use of a one-atom thick structure called “graphene” as a new carbon-based material for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices, perhaps paving the way for the massive installation of renewable energies such as wind and solar power.
The researchers believe their breakthrough shows promise that graphene (a form of carbon) could eventually double the capacity of existing ultracapacitors, which are manufactured using an entirely different form of carbon.
“Through such a device, electrical charge can be rapidly stored on the graphene sheets, and released from them as well for the delivery of electrical current and, thus, electrical power,” says Rod Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor and a physical chemist. “There are reasons to think that the ability to store electrical charge can be about double that of current commercially used materials. We are working to see if that prediction will be borne out in the laboratory.”
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Saturday 25 October, 2008 02:38 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by George Tan
Researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: it absorbs all the energy contained in sunlight, and generates electrons in a way that makes them easier to capture. Ohio State University (Columbus, OH) chemists and their colleagues combined electrically conductive plastic with metals including molybdenum (Mo) and titanium (Ti) to create the hybrid material.
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Wednesday 22 October, 2008 05:09 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Yan Chu
BASF, the big German chemicals company, virtualized a sophisticated desktop application that its engineers were using to model complex chemical processes. In doing so, it found application performance was slowed at the desktop but a number of other advantages offset that effect.
Application virtualization is different from the current wave of stacking up virtual servers on a single physical machine, the widely recognized practice of server consolidation. It's also different from desktop virtualization, where every end user often gets a virtual machine.
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Saturday 18 October, 2008 04:25 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
In the traditional design world , engineers design the product, but the material is simply selected from a catalog of available material properties. In the next material world, engineers will design both the product and the materials. Concurrent design will be the key to competing in tomorrow's manufacturing world, researchers say. Traditionally, the performance of materials is quantified in terms of simple sets of properties. Product designers have historically used catalogs of material properties either online or in books and they interface with the material supplier in what is called the material selection process. They simply select materials which meet performance requirements.
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Wednesday 15 October, 2008 03:12 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Yan Chu
Researchers at the Institute of Photonics, University of Strathclyde, have started work on a 3.5 year project to develop a novel solid-state laser design incorporating CVD (chemical vapour deposition) diamond manufactured by Element Six Ltd. Element Six leads the world in the field of CVD diamond synthesis and its application
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Tuesday 14 October, 2008 12:37 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
The Waukesha Water Utility , in partnership with two Milwaukee colleges, is testing emerging clean-water technology that removes potentially cancer-causing radium from Waukesha's drinking water.
The technology has proved to be effective in reducing radium levels by 60% to 90%, which could provide Waukesha a temporary fix until it finds another water source, possibly Lake Michigan.
But the technology has a potential problem, utility manager Dan Duchniak said. That’s where the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Civil Engineering Department becomes involved. The possible fix is that the utility gets into the aggregate business.
Along with radium, the system from Procorp Enterprises of Wauwatosa removes calcium, a substance that hardens water and ruins water pipes and plumbing fixtures.
The system compresses byproduct calcium into pellets, which contain low levels of radium, he said. Other industrial byproducts such as fly ash and slag also contain radium and are converted into byproduct reuse, a Procorp report on the project says.
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Monday 29 September, 2008 08:20 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Ali Hamoud
Metal alloys are solids made from at least two different metallic elements. The elements are often mixed together as liquid, and when they "freeze," into solids, tiny grains of crystal form to create a polycrystalline material. A polycrystalline material is made of multiple crystals.
Within each of the grains of crystal, atoms are arranged in a periodic pattern. This pattern isn't perfect, though. For example, some of the places atoms should be are empty. These empty spaces are called vacancies. Atoms of each element in the alloy take advantage of these holes in the lattice. In a process called diffusion, atoms hop through the material, changing its structure.
"It's kind of like musical chairs," said Katsuyo Thornton, assistant professor in the U-M Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "Diffusion happens in nearly every material, and materials can degrade because diffusion causes certain changes in the structure of the material."
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Friday 26 September, 2008 06:12 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by jackson Browne
Scientists from the Carlos III University of Madrid have developed a system that can improve the efficiency of the conversion process of biomass to fuel gas that will contribute to the production of energy in a more sustainable manner.
One of the challenges that chemical engineers face is placing solid materials in contact with gases to generate certain reactions. One of the options is to use a fluidised bed, consisting of a vertical cylinder with a perforated plate inside where solid particles are introduced using pressurised air.
This way, the solid particles are suspended, and behave much like boiling water. Solids behaving like a liquid depend on the speed of the air stream, making it key to achieving the desired behaviour. With insufficient air, the particles don’t move, but with too much the opposite happens, and they are carried away by the air stream.
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Wednesday 17 September, 2008 01:25 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Tony Elmasri
Scientists from the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) have developed a system that can improve the efficiency of the conversion process of biomass to fuel gas that will contribute to the production of energy in a more sustainable manner.
One of the challenges that chemical engineers face is placing solid materials in contact with gases to generate certain reactions. One of the options is to use a fluidised bed, consisting of a vertical cylinder with a perforated plate inside where solid particles are introduced using pressurised air.
This way, the solid particles are suspended, and behave much like boiling water. Solids behaving like a liquid depend on the speed of the air stream, making it key to achieving the desired behaviour. With insufficient air, the particles don’t move, but with too much the opposite happens, and they are carried away by the air stream.
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Wednesday 17 September, 2008 03:29 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Adam Crighton
A coproduct of ethanol production could be used as a non-petroleum-based filler in plastics, based on preliminary studies by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists and their cooperators.
The ethanol coproduct, called distiller's dried grains with solubles (DDGS), has a high fiber content and a molecular structure suitable for binding—two attributes that make it a candidate as a filler in plastics, according to ARS agricultural engineer Kurt Rosentrater.
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Monday 30 June, 2008 04:34 PM |
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