Nitration is one of the most established yet challenging reactions in the chemical industry. It has been practiced for more than a century, but nitration accidents and scale-up failures continue to occur. Regulatory pressure in China has also increased. China’s…
Glycolonitrile A Key Bulk Agrochemical Intermediate and Its Transition Toward Greener Production In the fine chemical and bulk agrochemical industries, large-scale markets are often supported not by highly specialized heterocyclic compounds but by basic nitrile intermediates. Glycolonitrile has a significant…
Many problems encountered when moving from the laboratory to industrial production can be traced back to poor distribution. Anyone who has worked on process scale-up has probably experienced this situation. A reaction performs smoothly in the laboratory but develops problems…
Abstract: It took just one year to improve from 21.50 seconds to 9.32 seconds. Robotics is advancing at remarkable speed, and upstream materials and process technologies must keep pace. 8.86 Seconds and 3.40 Metres on the Field: Half Algorithm, Half…
Distillation columns are among the most widely used separation units in chemical plants. Most chemical-process professionals are familiar with their basic operation, but diagnosing abnormalities such as flooding, liquid backup, severe entrainment, and hydraulic overload can still be difficult. Operators…
Can a High Reflux Ratio Really Solve Every Distillation Problem? This article is based on a commissioning and troubleshooting assignment I handled several years ago. The project involved a vacuum distillation system that I had not designed. It was also…
A Nine-Part Competency Framework for Distillation Systems A frequently asked question is: What does a distillation process design package include? More broadly, what work is involved in distillation process technology? A qualified specialist in distillation—and particularly in high-vacuum distillation—must integrate…
In chemical engineering, three terms appear throughout project development: Process Design Package, basic engineering, and detailed engineering. Yet their respective roles and relationships are not always clear to new engineers, investors, or project managers. Key questions include: This article explains…
In Flow Chemistry, Volume 2: Applications (2nd ed., De Gruyter, 2021) — a textbook edited by leading figures in flow chemistry including Ferenc Darvas, Volker Hessel, and Steven V. Ley — DODGEN’s commercial millimeter-scale zigzag-tube heat exchange equipment is referenced…
Introduction Searches for “sodium ferrocyanide production process” or “how sodium ferrocyanide is produced” often lead only to reaction equations. In industrial production, however, the process must integrate cyanide-containing feedstocks, complexation reactions, solid-liquid separation, evaporation and concentration, controlled crystallization, and mother…