4 replies to this topic

[Maheshjadav]

Hello.. Everyone..
Can You please tell mi...
Diffrance... In column.. when column used in Petrochemical Industry.. and if they used in Refinery

[Arpit_Jain]

What I believe is that column depends on the purpose and it is not industry specific. It may be fractionator for crude distillation, stripper for removing H₂S or lighters, absorber etc. You will find all these types of columns for various functions in refinery itself. 

[paulhorth]

Maheshjadav,

The English word "Column" is used in chemical engineering to refer to a piece of equipment in which vapour and liquid streams flow in a vertical direction, usually in opposite directions, and are brought into contact by flowing through internals, These internals are usually trays or packing.The function of the column is to achieve mass transfer of components between the vapour and liquid streams, This function is usually named as fractionation, stripping or absorption,

The term Column is used across all the process engineering industries as far as I know.

The English word "Tower" is used for exactly the same item of equipment, sometimes tower and column appear together even in the same document. This can lead to confusion when the text is translated from English.  However, "Tower" also can mean an item without any internals, such as a quench tower or a prilling tower, or simply a tall structure.

 

Paul

[Art Montemayor]

Paul Horth is correct in his comments.  The English language is one of the richest (if not THE richest) communications medium in the world, thanks to its unique and liberal "open architecture" (as opposed to closed architecture, which doesn't allow for easy nor sanctioned changes, innovations, adaptions, or interpretations - such as French, Spanish, etc.).  This, in my opinion, has made it the most popular and widest used language internationally.

 

HOWEVER, due to its liberal attitude in usage and its ease of accomodating other languages, there is a tradeoff that has to be paid:  everyone is entitled to their own versions, descriptions, and usage of the language, thereby creating a variety of nouns, adjectives, and adverbs that all say essentially the same thing.  Witness the physical size of the English unabridged dictionary as compared with the French and Spanish versions.  There is no comparison; the English language has far more words in its vocabulary.  That's how we arrive at "column" and "tower" meaning the same thing - as do the words "separator", "KO pot", "scrubber", etc.  English is a very descriptive and rich language; however, it is a difficult one to master in vocabulary and spelling. 

[kkala]

 English language is quite rich because it is used and promoted by comparatively many people, having been leaders in science, technology and trade so far. A secondary reason is than English language origin is ~50% German (Saxons) and ~ 50% Latin (Romans, Normands), so there can be two words of same meaning, like looking glass and mirror. But both tower and column have probably come from Latin (*) 
Before English, French was the language taught in the schools here (up to second world war), famous for its clarity. Everything changes, some other language will be internationally predominant in the future.

 

(*) Editing note, 27 Feb 13: <http://en.wiktionary...onary:Main_Page> indicates that tower is from old English torr, probably from welsh twr; column comes from Latin columna. So this may be the case of same meaning attributed by two words of  different origin.

I thought yesterday that tower comes from Latin, like French tour. The latter comes from Latin turris. Tower might have come from one original old word, common in German and Latin.

Edited by kkala, 27 February 2013 - 02:13 AM.