Ankur's_Chemical_Engg_Blog

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...

There are many engineering consultants / contractors in the field of Chemical Process industry which may further be sub-divided into Oil & Gas, Refining, Petrochemicals, Fine Chemicals, Water Resource Management etc. Most of these consultants / contractors have a Business Development (BD) cell whose job is basically get business or in other words...

With sharp focus on conservation of energy and water, recycling of waste for long-term sustainability of our environment, we all need to play our part, even in an engineering design office. Following are some recommendations to effectively contribute in our own small way in an office environment to sustain our environment:

Paper Procurement, Printing...

Working in an engineering design consultancy for almost 15 years has given me some insight into what needs to be done to work more efficiently and save time. Following are some rules that I would recommend:

1. Collect all data beforehand before starting any calculation. For example, if you are doing a pump hydraulic calculations have the following...

When I first started working in engineering design I came to know the real significance of the word "assume".
But can we avoid assumptions? The practical view point is that you cannot avoid assumptions during the initial phase of engineering design. Let us understand why it is necessary to assume during the initial stages of...

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 Readers may find a few things that are some what outdated, and I would like them to give me some leeway considering that this write-up was written quite some time back....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 do not claim to have knowledge of the subject of human psychology, but working 25 years in the chemical process industry I have seen two kinds of engineers and managers both in the operations and engineering side. The first kind who take decisions and own up to them, and which I try to emulate but not always successfully, and the second kind who avoid...

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...

REAL ENGINEERS... · Real Engineers consider themselves well dressed if their socks match.
· Real Engineers buy their spouses a set of matched screwdrivers for their birthday.
· Real Engineers wear mustaches or beards for "efficiency". Not because they're lazy.
· Real engineers have a non-technical vocabulary of 800 words.
· Real...

I have encountered a lot of fresh chemical engineering graduates from college who joined as "trainees" in the engineering consultancy field and inevitably they have a lot of questions on what process design engineering is all about?

Some of the frequently asked questions (FAQ's) are what are the activities that a process design engineer do,...