More than 100 years ago, Ivory Soap started claiming, and still says, its bar of soap is “ninety-nine and forty-four-one-hundredths percent pure.” At the time, that was an astonishing figure, but in much of the chemical manufacturing industry today, 99.44% purity...
In a Hydrocarbon Engineering article, Control Valve Selection for Ethylene Plants, Matthew Wagner describes how to choose the right combination of valve style, trim type, materials of construction, and digital positioners for critical valve application in an ethylene unit.
The cold section of an ethylene plant is responsible for cooling and purifying the product-grade ethylene, propylene and other bi-products from the cracking furnaces. Cracked gas is cooled in transfer-line exchangers which produce steam from the effluent gas energy. Gas is further cooled with water in the quench column, scrubbed and dried before being compressed in the cracked gas compressor and fed to the cold box.
Cracking furnaces are one of the most crucial parts of an ethylene complex. They set the production and yield for the entire plant. For furnace-limited plants, when a furnace is down, whether for maintenance or decoking, production is lost.
Olefins, also known as alkenes, are unsaturated hydrocarbons, use to make many petrochemical products such as plastics. Olefin production, including ethylene, propylene and butadiene products, requires tight control for higher throughput, more energy efficient, and...
For a valve, zero leakage is defined as no visible leakage when tested at high pressure with water and low pressure with air according to existing international standards. Some of these seat leakage standards for control and isolation valves include ANSI/FCI 70-2/IEC...
For manufacturers with energy intensive processes, such as the petrochemical industry, the shale oil and gas boom in North America has led to lower feedstock costs. In this short, 1:34 video, Emerson's James Beall describes some of the challenges faced by plants to...
With vast shale gas reserves, will China move from coal-to-chemicals processes to gas-to-chemicals processes going forward? Emerson's Douglas Morris, a member of the alternative energy industry team explores this question in today's guest post. We've had a number of...
I caught up with Emerson's Tim Olsen, Chair of the AIChE Fuels and Petrochemicals Division (F&PD), to get an update of the work of this division. For those unfamiliar with this group, the AIChE's F&PD: …was established to further the application of chemical...
A few weeks ago, I relayed a story from Emerson's James Beall about a process of ongoing plant control performance improvements on which he's been working with a process manufacturer. He said he had another great story about an ethylene furnace optimization project....
A recent Wall Street Journal article, U.S. Expects Steady Climb in Energy Prices opens: Energy prices are undergoing a long, slow march higher as major economies shake off the effects of last year's recession, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Tuesday in...
Reconciling Mass and Energy Balances in an Ethylene Complex is the name of a presentation recently given by Emerson's Patrick Truesdale. The venue was the 2009 AIChE annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. Patrick is a senior consultant on the Industry Solutions team...
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