Process Engineering articles from January 2000

Process Engineering archives from January 2000

Groundbreaking in Singapore.
January 1, 2000... BASF and Shell have launched the first major project of the millennium in Singapore, with their styrene monomer/propylene oxide joint venture breaking ground on a $500million plant. Producing 550,000tpa of SM and 250,000tpa of PO, the plant is...

Leadership is key to R&D.
January 1, 2000... Companies in the process sectors are not making the most of the research and development efforts, according to a new report from PA Consulting. Effective leadership and a creative approach to research are just as important as an adequate R&D...

Steel yourself.
January 1, 2000... The British Stainless Steel Association has launched a free technical advisory service, on 0114-224 2240 or ssas@materials.org.uk Copyright: Centaur Communications Limited.

Volume growth ahead for chemicals in 2000.
January 1, 2000... The lean times for the chemical industry in Europe, and especially the UK, seem to be over - for the moment at least. That was the message from the Chemical Industries Association's economic panel, announced by BP chief economist Malcolm...

COMAH deadline looms for processes.
January 1, 2000... Time is running out for companies that store and use hazardous chemicals to inform the government of their plans to prevent major accidents, the Health and Safety Executive has warned. Firms that are subject to the Control of Major Hazard...

Fastest steam plant.
January 1, 2000... The fastest-responding steam plant in the UK, shown here, is helping Terra Nitrogen operate its air separation plant at Billingham on Teesside. Based around three 29.5t/hr shell and tube steam boilers, the plant delivers 50t/hr of steam at 350...

Ciba and Nalco/Exxon team up for processing alliance.
January 1, 2000... A global alliance between Ciba Specialty Chemicals and Nalco/Exxon Energy Chemicals aims to enlarge its share in the process and refining chemicals market. Ciba will produce and supply products and technologies used in process treatment...

Engineers' role is vital, says EC.
January 1, 2000... The presence of engineers in the workforce increases both a company's productivity and profitability, says an Engineering Council report. `Government consistently claims that engineering contributes just 8 per cent to UK GDP. However, our...

Trautz named as jv chief.
January 1, 2000... Volker Trautz has been named as the president of Shell and BASF's proposed polyolefins joint venture. Currently in charge of styrenic polymers, PVC, polyurethanes and engineering plastics at BASF, as well as the Asia Pacific region, Trautz will...

Painting market set for growth.
January 1, 2000... Worldwide demand for paints and coatings is set to grow at 4.6 per cent per year, reaching 26milllon tonnes by 2003, according to the Freedonia Group. The market will then be worth more than $80billion, it adds. Large expansions in North...

Water treatment award.
January 1, 2000... Significant improvements in the water treatment programme at Dow Corning's plant in Barry, South Glamorgan has won the company a `Return on Environment Partnership Award' from BetzDearborn. The water treatment company gives the awards to its...

Shell heads online.
January 1, 2000... Shell has become the first of the petrochemical majors to take the leap into the e-commerce field by setting up the basis of a global internet market place for the oil, gas and chemical industry. Established as a joint venture with Commerce...

Government agrees climate change targets for chemical/paper industries.
January 1, 2000... The government has agreed energy efficiency targets from the chemicals and paper industries which could lead to 80 per cent exemptions from the proposed climate change levy. The Chemical Industries Association has pledged to cut specific...

EC clearance for Honeywell.
January 1, 2000... The European Commission has cleared the merger of AlliedSignal and Honeywell to form a new conglomerate trading under the Honeywell name. The company expects to complete the integration process by the middle of this year. The company is...

Capacity added at Elf Atochem.
January 1, 2000... Elf Atochem has started up a new plastic additive plant at Vlissingen, the Netherlands. Producing acrylic impact modifiers and blending process aids, the plant increases the company's plastic additives capacity to some 30,000tpa at the...

IT the target for power producers.
January 1, 2000... The next round of pollution prevention improvements at power generation plants will involve significant investment in information technology, according to the MacIlvaine Company. Digital control systems will be the subject of the largest...

Pharmaceutical giants announce mega-merger.
January 1, 2000... As PE goes to press, the UK's leading pharmaceutical companies, Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, have announced their intention to merge to form the world's biggest drug company with sales of #15billion and a 7.3 per cent share of the...

Laporte improvements.
January 1, 2000... New production facilities, storage areas, distillation plant and reactors, and improvements in incineration plant are on the cards for Laporte Fine Chemicals' facility on Teesside. The improvements will help meet projected demand for...

BNFL buys ABB's nuclear operations.
January 1, 2000... A #300million deal is set to see ABB's nuclear businesses brought into BNFL. As part of its efforts to expand into a global player, BNFL is absorbing the Swedish firm's businesses into its Westinghouse Electric subsidiary. Headquartered in...

China takeaway.
January 1, 2000... Liquid separations specialist PCI-Memtech has won a contract from the Lukang Pharmaceutical Group in China for the supply of two membrane plants to improve the yield of a pharmaceutical intermediate, 6APA. Copyright: Centaur Communications...

A gas for FWEL.
January 1, 2000... Foster Wheeler Energy (FWEL) has won a contract from Saudi Aramco for work on the Saudi Haradh natural gas project. FWEL is to develop overall project management, preliminary engineering, essential procurement, construction management and...

Show shapes up.
January 1, 2000... This year's Processing and Packaging Machinery Association PPMA Show will for the first time include members of the Solids Handling and Processing Association. The 93 SHAPA members are involved in handling, conveying and processing powders or...

Conoco control.
January 1, 2000... Conoco's Humber Refinery has placed a $6million contract with Honeywell Control Systems for the design, construction and commissioning of a TotalPlant Solution (TPS) system. The scope of the contract ranges from process sensors through to...

Year-end brings burst of process acquisitions.
January 1, 2000... Pre-empting the end-of-year fireworks, the process equipment marketplace was lit up last month by a spate of mergers and acquisitions that see many famous names under new ownership in the new year. Kicking off the shake-up was the...

Extension to CHP plant.
January 1, 2000... Gogen, the combined-heat-and-power arm of National Power, is to build a #15million extension to its existing CHP plant at Aylesford Newsprint's mill in Kent. The 40MW third-phase expansion will make the Aylesford plant one of the largest CHP...

Boost for AMEC as orders flow.
January 1, 2000... In a #25million deal, AMEC has entered into a five-year alliance with Union Carbide to supply engineering support services for the US chemical company's plants at Wilton, Teesside. Areas of work covered initially include turnarounds, scheduled...

PlantWeb chalks up 500.
January 1, 2000... Fisher-Rosemount has reached the 500 mark in project sales of its field- based PlantWeb control architecture. Ranging from individual operating units to large integrated projects with more than 19000 I/O, the automation systems have gone around...

Some people thought it was all over.
January 1, 2000... Well, it was such a good party that it simply won't go away. Celebration of the year 2000 continues with the naming of over 1000 products to have been awarded Millennium Product status by the Design Council. Among the great and the good is...

Distributed, but together.
January 1, 2000... With the introduction of `Distributed Server Architecture' as part of its PlantScape Release 300 suite of offerings, Honeywell claims to have launched the `next generation of process control'. What the new technology does is to allow multiple...

MCERTS makes its mark.
January 1, 2000... An oxygen analyser from ABB Instrumentation and an HCl analyser from Servomex are among the first items of equipment to be granted accreditation under the Environment Agency's MCERTS monitoring certification scheme. The first instruments...

Tests put packing top.
January 1, 2000... Supagraf Premier, the latest fugitive emission control packing from sealing specialist James Walker, has come top of its class in comparative tests run by Akzo Nobel in the Netherlands. The chemical company tested 20 graphite, PTFE and...

Leaving it to the specialists.
January 1, 2000... According to centrifuge specialist Westfalia Separator, speciality is the key to excellence in process plant manufacture. It is for this reason, says the company, that it has now out-sourced all its systems manufacture to other specialist...

Krupp Uhde acquires reforming.
January 1, 2000... German process technology specialist Krupp Uhde has bought the rights to an olefin-generating steam reforming process from Phillips Petroleum. The STAR (steam active reforming) process will give the company access to the growing polypropylene...

Microwave plasma is hot stuff for high-temp work.
January 1, 2000... A new plasma heater could help boost the performance of incinerators and be a valuable tool for high-temperature research, according to its developers at EA Technology. Working at atmospheric pressure, the device can heat gas streams to around...

Chilli source from cold gas.
January 1, 2000... If your frozen curry is lacking in punch, a new freezing process developed by Air Products might help restore the vim to the vindaloo. Based around cryogenic techniques rather than conventional slow air chilling, the `Cryo-Cool' chiller freezes...

AEA product to help boost profits from oil production.
January 1, 2000... A technology more familiar from the pharmaceutical industry could help boost oil producers' bottom line by reducing drastically the amount of downtime needed on certain types of oil well, according to AEA Technology. ChemFlow, which uses...

Compressor helps bottle the bubbles for Buxton.
January 1, 2000... As well as the still version of the UK's top brand of mineral water. But the compressed air equipment supplied by Ecoair UK to the Buxton Mineral Water Company's bottling plant has nothing to do with the actual gas content of the water. The air...

Global process automation is now really the real thing.
January 1, 2000... If anyone doubted the truly global nature of the process industries, then just consider the world's best-known brand Coca-Cola. The corporation's Japanese division has just selected Fisher-Rosemount's PlantWeb field-based architecture to serve...

Putting more vim into Vimto.
January 1, 2000... Atlanta (and Japan, see above) might boast of the `real thing', exiled Scots might cry into their Irn-Bru, but Lancastrians have long voiced the virtues of Vimto. Those virtues are now being enhanced through an advanced water treatment plant at...

Lime dosing gets upgrade solution.
January 1, 2000... At North West Water's Cumwhinton wastewater treatment works near Carlisle, operators were experiencing problems with a lime dosing system. They had all the common faults associated with handling hydrated lime - inconsistent flow rates and...

MANHATTAN PROJECTS.
January 1, 2000... Equipment suppliers and plant operators from across the whole spectrum of the process industries congregated at November's Chem Show in New York. Stuart Nathan starts spreading the news The food court at the Jacob K Javits Centre on...

Water dives into digital VALVE CONTROL.
January 1, 2000... One of the first applications of digital control in the water industry has recently gone on-line. Mike Spear followed the yellow cable road to Essex to see what advantages it can bring While the control world argues over which fieldbus will...

Done and dusted? GO FOR QUALITY.
January 1, 2000... John Whitehead explains how high quality dust control provides the best value for money to suppliers, re-sellers and exporters of bulk handling equipment Silos, conveyors, weighing, loading, tipping and other processing machinery need...

Ciba success for Spiroflow.
January 1, 2000... Ciba Specialty Chemicals has installed six Spiroflow bulk-bag dischargers designed to ensure consistent flow of dry raw materials from FIBCs. With a number of patented design features, the dischargers have inflatable spout seals to...

No holes in these buckets.
January 1, 2000... At British Steel's Llanwern works a clean air campaign has resulted in an order for Nerak-Wiese's WB continuous-bucket vertical conveying system. Chosen by main contractor Mannesmann Demag, the system handles the solid matter removed from a...

Fat mixing is a piece of cake.
January 1, 2000... The commercial preparation of fat and flour catering mixes used to be done in conventional ribbon mixers fitted with thin piano wires. These produced a light, free-flowing mix but were limited to about 18 per cent fat addition - and the wires...

Entecon on test.
January 1, 2000... With demand for its custom-built conveyor systems on the increase, Entecon has developed its test facility at its Camberley, Surrey, headquarters. Available on a free-of-charge basis, the test centre will demonstrate the advantages of Entecon's...

Compressors' moving story.
January 1, 2000... With the launch of its low capacity ZE2 series of low-pressure compressors, Atlas Copco Compressors can now offer oil-free air from 130 to 1936 l/s (275 to 4100 cfm) at pressures from 1 to 3.5 barg for a variety of applications in the...

All-Fill filling in for Fyllan.
January 1, 2000... All-Fill International, the powders and granules filling specialist, has taken on the after-sales support service of Transmatic Fyllan following the closure last November of Transmatic's powder filling machinery manufacturing site in Bedford....

Hazardous handling no problem.
January 1, 2000... As part of a materials handling contract for Sorex, a producer of hazardous materials for controlling vermin and airborne pests, the weighing and metering specialist Rospen had three major problems to overcome - access, accuracy and dust...

Multi-screw feeder designed for pharmaceuticals.
January 1, 2000... Designed specifically for pharmaceutical industry applications, Bran + Luebbe's Tomal 224F multi-screw feeder is made from stainless steel and is designed to be fully opened for cleaning access to all components. The machine's design also...

Something in the Air.
January 1, 2000... Non-cryogenic air separation processes are an important part of the industrial gases industry, especially where the gases' physical properties are more important than their chemistry. Stuart Nathan looks at the development of the market and the...

Small sensors, large market.
January 1, 2000... Miniaturisation of sensors and bus networking are set to trigger new growth in the market for temperature sensors and instruments in Europe, according to a report from Frost & Sullivan. The total market will be worth some $530million by 2006,...

Brewery relies on UV to keep the bitter at its best.
January 1, 2000... With a history dating back to 1790 Harveys Brewery in Lewes, East Sussex, naturally takes pride in its range of draught beers, including Harveys Sussex Best Bitter. To protect that heritage - and the quality of all of its 35 000 barrels...