Last year my work took my to a small group specialized in engineering support for sulfuric acid plants, mainly those helping the mining industry have plants on hand for processing ore. You know H2So4, right?
![Copper mining and sulfuric acid plant, Copperhill], Tenn.](http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2166/2178264447_9dc4fe008d.jpg "Acid plant in a Copper Mine (1939)")
Acid plant in a Copper Mine (1939)
Sitting in the office of one of most the senior guys there, who I definitely respect, a huge yet well-worn and sticky-tabbed book caught my eye. It was the Handbook of Sulphuric Acid Manufacturing, Second Edition, by Douglas K. Louie, P.Eng. You can read about it here. The book covers everything from simulations to maintenance, written by a man who’s been doing it his entire professional life. This was a go-to resource for even the top people in the office, and a great learning resource for the younger engineers.
Asking about the book also lead me to a favorite haunt of the office, sulphuric-acid.com. Part technical manual, part suppliers resource, part repository of standards and maintenance tips, it’s a great site. You might even want to check out their brief articles on utilities like cooling towers and instrument air, even if you don’t care about this industry.
Bonus: Sulphur or sulfur? Many formal groups like the IUPAC have ruled that “sulfur” is officially correct, yet you’ll still see the “ph” spelling quite often. If in doubt I’d pick “sulfur,” but if a plant or company is already using “ph” you’re not going to be able to change it.
Popularity: 1% [?]
An important part of using Apsen Basic Engineering (Zyqad) is having properly set up equipment and instrumentation datasheets, that can read key information from your project database and drop it into a customized datasheet that your clients and customers can understand. This isn’t usually a problem. Most datasheets are easily standardized forms, where a certain number of known, predictable fields are required to describe each type of equipment. “For a pump I need max and normal flowrates, design temperature, normal temperature, etc. etc… 20 fields in all. Let’s code it up!”
But a problem can come up when a datasheet has an unknown number of elements, and each element needs its own descriptors. For example, consider a distillation column that tries to separate fluids by passing them over many trays. It’s typical to provide a vendor with a column datasheet detailing the outer shell, and also a tray datasheet detailing the predicted conditions (temperature, pressure, vapor and liquid flowrates, viscosities, densities, molecular weights, etc.) on each and every tray within the tower, as well as the for condensers and reboilers. The problem is: how many trays will you have? The number varies all the time, and it’s possible a design office could be dealing with 10 trays, 40 trays, or anything in between. What to do? In particular, what do we do when there are so many trays you can’t always fit them all on a single page?
The following solution from Aspentech can help: it describes how to set up an “overspill,” so that a replicating unit (in this case, a row of tray data) can repeat itself onto multiple pages where necessary.
Read Example of Tray Datasheet which can overspill (Aspen Basic Engineering V7.2).
Note: You will need an Aspentech Support account. If your office uses Aspen Basic Engineering then you can probably get an account for free.
Popularity: 1% [?]
The website was down Dec. 6th and 7th. I was updating Introduction to Pressure Relief Valves Part 3 and ran into a nasty WordPress bug that deleted all of the articles and locked me out of writing anything new.
I had to revert the site to it’s Dec. 3rd state to fix things. If you registered on the site or provided comments between the 3rd and the 6th please do so a second time. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Popularity: 1% [?]
I stumbled upon this classroom course one day, while trying to do something particularly difficult in Aspentech’s Hysys. I learned a lot. The intricacies of the balance function, the different kinds of reactions, how to leverage the spreadsheet operation.
If you’re a heavy Hysys user, you may pick up some valueable tips at this Rice Engineering Hysys Design page.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Need help developing your thesis for an engineering, science, or business graduate degree? Or perhaps you want to know what you’re getting into before you sign on for grad school? Maybe you’re researching engineering degrees online and found this article?
Assuming you’re not about to take a course-based Masters program1, the most important new challenge that graduate school poses is the thesis. It’s a daunting problem: you need to get up-to-date in the latest research of your field, pick an entirely novel problem, develop a research plan, conduct careful experiments, and write a detailed thesis defending your work. What problems can you attack? How should you structure it? How can you avoid getting bogged down in the details? When are you doing enough to complete it?
After some asking around, I present two of the better articles on the subject. There’s some detailed and humane advice.
For Prospective Graduate Students
You Must Know Why Your Work is Important.
When you first arrive, read and think widely and exhaustively for a year. Assume that everything you read is bullshit until the author manages to convince you that it isn’t. If you do not understand something, don’t feel bad – it’s not your fault, it’s the author’s. He didn’t write clearly enough.
If some authority figure tells you that you aren’t accomplishing anything because you aren’t taking courses and you aren’t gathering data, tell him what you’re up to. If he persists, tell him to bug off, because you know what you’re doing, dammit.
This is a hard stage to get through because you will feel guilty about not getting going on your own research. You will continually be asking yourself, “What am I doing here?” Be patient. This stage is critical to your personal development and to maintaining the flow of new ideas into science. Here you decide what constitutes an important problem. You must arrive at this decision independently for two reasons. First, if someone hands you a problem, you won’t feel that it is yours, you won’t have that possessiveness that makes you want to work on it, defend it, fight for it, and make it come out beautifully. Secondly, your PhD work will shape your future. It is your choice of a field in which to carry out a life’s work. It is also important to the dynamic of science that your entry be well thought out. This is one point where you can start a whole new area of research. Remember, what sense does it make to start gathering data if you don’t know – and I mean really know – why you’re doing it?
Popularity: 2% [?]
- A course-based masters degree usually lasts 1-2 years. You focus on taking graduate-level courses and no thesis is required. It provides advanced education, but does not give you the same preparation for research [↩]
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