Chemical Process Equipment

Published by Alex | Filed under Chemistry

This book is intended as a guide to the selection or design of the principal kinds of chemical process equipment by engineers in school and industry. The level of treatment assumes an elementary knowledge of unit operations and transport phenomena. Access to the many design and reference books listed in Chapter 1 is desirable. For coherence, brief reviews of pertinent theory are provided. Emphasis is placed on shortcuts, rules of thumb, and data for design by analogy, often as primary design processes but also for quick evaluations of detailed work.
Chemical process equipment is of two kinds: custom designed and built, or proprietary “off the shelf.” For example, the sizes and performance of custom equipment such as distillation towers, drums, and heat exchangers are derived by the process engineer on the basis of established principles and data, although some mechanical details remain in accordance with safe practice codes and individual fabrication practices.
Much proprietary equipment (such as filters, mixers, conveyors, and so on) has been developed largely without benefit of much theory and is fitted to job requirements also without benefit of much theory. From the point of view of the process engineer, such equipment is predesigned and fabricated and made available by manufacturers in limited numbers of types, sizes, and capacities. The process design of proprietary equipment, as considered in this book, establishes its required performance and is a process of selection from the manufacturers’ offerings, often with their recommendations or on the basis of individual experience. Complete information is provided in manufacturers’ catalogs. Several classified lists of manufacturers of chemical process equipment are readily accessible, so no listings are given here.