Ankur's_Chemical_Engg_Blog

Somewhere around October 2008, I came across an article in the magazine "Chemical Engineering" with the title "Understanding Atmospheric Storage Tanks" by "Siddhartha Mukherhee". The article was very well written and also gave an in-depth insight into venting of atmospheric storage tanks both normal as well as emergency...

For the past week or so I had been doing my study on Static Mixers and that also made me think that I should be sharing what I have read and understood. The initial part which is a word description has been provided in the following text. However, the rough application guide for various commercial static mixer models and the pressure drop for the more...

Many a times during natural gas handling and transmission the composition of the gas in terms of its components is not known. This creates a certain amount of difficulty in arriving at properties of the NG being handled.

However, there are certain empirical equations for determining properties such as compressibility factor and gas viscosity with only the...

Recently we were asked to evaluate the merits and demerits of jet mixers versus side entry propeller mixers for tank blending mixing specially for tanks containing crude oils with BS&W.

Some investigation into the matter led us to the following information which might be slightly biased considering that the information has been provided by a SEPM...

The United States Environmental Protection Agency provides several guidlelines as well as codes for environmental protection.

A code of federal regulations (CFR) with the title CFR 40 Section 60.18 provides guidelines for determining the flare exit or tip velocities as a function of the calorific value of the flared gas.

The flare exit velocity is...

Have you (today's young engineers) wondered how it was to do engineering design in the earlier decades i.e. the 60's, 70's, 80's of the twentieth century. The mainstay of engineering design then was an extensive usage of graphs, charts and nomograms for a variety of data such as physical properties, thermodynamic properties, friction...

A few weeks back I was asked to prepare process engineering guidelines for various process engineering activities undertaken in the process engineering discipline in my company. This was a very challenging and interesting assignment and required preparing descriptive word documents which would be easy to understand and follow by young engineers.

There...

For the last 4 to 5 weeks I am preparing a presentation on pipeline flow assurance for some young engineers of my company.

Now I would like to present an abridged form of that presentation on my blog for the benefit of the forum readers.

Here is how it goes:
"Flow assurance is an engineering analysis process to assure hydrocarbon fluids are...

I would consider the profession of a chemical engineer very noble, probably just next to a medical professional and researchers in terms of nobility. Am I going overboard in exalting my own kind? No, I am being realistic.

Do you know that a lot of chemical engineers are directly employed in the pharmaceutical and pharmaceutical intermediate...

Dear All,

It is time to present the third and concluding part of Petroleum Technology which is the last of what I compiled about 6 years ago. Technology changes overnight in present times. Readers may find a few things that are some what outdated, and I would like them to give me some leeway considering that this write-up was written quite some time back....

I have seen both aspects of engineering -Operations and Design and hence feel some what qualified on the subject of how a operations enineer and a design engineer think. Ideally, there shouldn't be a diference in the manner which an engineer thinks and analyzes be it Operations or Design. But having seen both aspects of engineering the fact of the...

Dear fellow chemical engineers,

A friend of mine forwarded me a copy of an industrial incident of a storage tank explosion at Glenpool, Oklahoma which describes the danger of static electricity in the petroleum industry. After going through the report I felt the need to do some more searching of the subject. One aspect of static electricity build up is in...

Petroleum and its products have been an integral part of mankind since long. For a historical perspective of petroleum readers are referred to the following link:

http://en.wikipedia....ry_of_petroleum

However, the research on composition of petroleum was taken up in earnest only in...

A long part of my career was spent in polymer production, specifically Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET). In the initial years (circa. 1986) when I was working as an Operations Engineer, the technology in India was still pre-dominantly batch production. Some of the technologies for PET batch production were 'ICI' and 'Monsanto'. Today these...

Quite some time back (about 6 years back) I had done some write-up using known references for Petroleum technology. The blog on petroleum glossary was just one part of it. Fossil fuels (specially petroleum) will continue to play a major part in the lives of man-kind for another century or so until we run out of these resources to the extent of economical...

Many times we look forward to meanings and definitions for petroleum production and processing related terms. Quite some time back I had compiled my own little glossary of petroleum terms with the best available resources and here is what I came up with:

Aniline Point: It is defined as the temperature of a binary liquid solution at which equal parts...