I’m just a humble O&G engineer. I make propane and propane accessories. I understand how propane as a propellant works. How do they make squeeze cheese work without propane?

https://youtu.be/ma1LtMBo7nI?si=qmxEpXFvVWI5RvTl

What do you think about this? Would this change your daily workflow?

Hey everyone!
I'm a 4th-year chemical engineering student, and I'm building a small AI-powered station using a NVIDIA Jetson nano to apply machine learning to process simulations like Aspen Plus. The idea is to export simulation data (temperature, pressure, flow rates, yield, etc.) and use AI models (e.g. , Random Forest) to make predictions or even optimize process parameters. I’d love to hear if anyone has worked on something similar, especially using affordable hardware like Raspberry Pi or Jetson Nano. Any tips, ideas, or examples would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

I'm having an argument at work that propane nor refrigerant tanks secondary containment. I don't believe they require it, as that's how I've always seen them built and I can rationalize why. But I can't seem to find anything to support that.

Our prof asked us this question and i really don’t know what’s the correct answer. Can you help me?

I have two knife gate valves that I want to put in series in a tight piping section. And these I would like to be flange to flange with longer bolts. So the stack would be flange - gate valve - gate valve - flange. They will be slightly rotated so the actuators doesn’t collide.

Is there any reason this wouldn’t work? Or adviced not to?

I am working on an industrial application, where I need to pump mineral oil and liquid silicone separately from barrels into a container. The container will be on a scale. There will be a PLC and a HMI, the HMI is used to select liquid type (oil or silicone), and weight. The PLC will control the operation of the pump, possibly with a solenoid valve for precise weight control.

Each operation will yield about ~20 lbs of liquid with a couple of minutes. The pump will turn on, pump until the weight is reached, and turn off. I need the precision to be within +/- 1%. I would like a small footprint. Pump can be electrical or air operated. What is the best type of pump for my application?

Hello people of Reddit, I work in production engineering at a chemical company, and we make phosphate based products. One of the improvements I’ve been wanting to make is lowering our phosphate grade in the final product, it’s been touching 53.5 % etc instead of around 52 %. Issue is that there are many different raffinates in our feed such as amber, purified acid, sludge etc in order to reach 52, and every time the feed is variable due to various conditions so it’s almost hard to predict what type of feed is going in. After we send an 8 am sample to the lab, it takes about 4 hours to breakdown everything in the product according to wt % etc. main thing that decrease phosphoric levels is sulfuric acid, but as it’s fed, it makes granule sizes smaller, making that an issue for the screens to send good amount of product. Though, do you guys have thoughts on how to decrease phosphoric levels immediately as the feed is variable.

Hey everyone! I’m exploring ideas around how AI or smart digital tools could help chemical engineers, especially those working in Advanced Process Control (APC), EPC firms, or process design consulting, streamline their work and focus more on solving real problems rather than wrestling with software and repetitive tasks.

So I’m curious: What’s a part of your workflow you wish could be automated, reimagined, or simplified? Think of those things that make you go: “Ugh, this again?” Anything that makes you feel like a human Excel macro or PDF wrangler

I’m gathering feedback to spark ideas for new tools that could actually help us in practice.

Thanks in advance, and looking forward to hearing your pain points or wish-list features!

Hi, as per title. Usually we would use excel and this is off standard industry stuff, but often the user needs to simulate properties from HYSYS or UniSim especially for say the HEM method or gas expansion case. Has anyone done this in python? I’m going to do it as a bit of a project for myself to improve my sizing skills and coding skills. I will use thermo library and coolprop. I already built a very accurate line sizing and optimisation program and pump sizing program, so this seems like the next good challenge! Thanks!

I don’t understand: I have a flow of 40 m³/h going into the wrong tank. The reaction is exothermic (NH₄OH + HNO₃ → NH₄NO₃ + H₂O) with −51 kJ/mol. How do I calculate the evaporation flow for PSV sizing?

Someone told me the tank volume is not important can anyone explaine.

Me i will look for mass in the tank then obtain the flow by dvinding by /deltaH vap!

Im currently designing a fire tube boiler for a 3rd year project and am now onto drawing my P&ID. ive attached my current design but im unsure if ive missed anything or if i am actually doing it correctly. Any advice would be massively appreciated!

I’m sizing a PSV for a blocked vent scenario. The vent gas is 90% H₂O and 10% CO₂ by mass. I need to convert both components into air-equivalent flow in Nm³/h for PSV sizing. I know how to do this for CO₂, but I’m not sure how to handle H₂O vapor in the conversion. What’s the correct way to do this? Can i use the formula up

Hi genius

i have this assignment of designing a simulation of a whole FPSO system. Its my first time using aspen hysys (my lecturer didnt even teach the basics and just gave us a whole guide) so i dont really know how to get around here so chatgpt and this reddit post is my last hope (my lecturer responds to my emails really late)

my hp and lp gas flow is 0 i have no idea why my vapour fraction for both gasses are 1 and the inlet from HP gas is crude oil so im assuming the vapour fraction is 0 i need one of the inlets in the gas manifold to have a non zero flow for me to work with this (or both of the seperators)

the guide really didnt tell me what is petrolium assay and stuff like that so i dont know whats going on i really need help

At our company we make various cosmetics products like creams, gels, ointments. We use jacketed mixing machines to mix these products. Usually the products have a water and oil phase. We put the water phase in the mixing machine, heat up the water in the jacket with the built in heating elements, which heats the product inside the tank. We heat the oil phase seperately. When everything is up to temp, we mix the two phases, and we cool the product to around 25-30C.
So far we used tap water to cool these machines, but this is a huge waste, and our tap water is very hard, which ruins everything.
I'm looking for a chiller to cool the jacket of these mixing machines. I contacted a few different companies, but my issue is that a lot of them usually work in HVAC and don't seem to understand what we're doing. I've had companies recommending chillers anywhere from 15 to 150kw.

To give you some numbers, we have a 150l mixing machine for example. We usually mix 120-130l of product in it. The volume of the jacket is 40-50l. I built a cooling/heating system for this machine that could be used with a chiller in the future. It has a circulation pump on the jacket side, plate heat exchanger, PID controller which controls the heating elements, and controls a motorized ball valve which lets tap water flow through the other side of the HX.
We usually heat the jacket water and product inside the tank to 75-80c, then we cool the product to around 25-30c. Currently if the jacket and product temp is at 75-80c and I set 20c (temp of the jacket water) on the PID to turn on cooling, the jacket water reaches 20c in around 13-15 minutes. Tap water is usually 13C and flow is 10-15lpm.
After the jacket water cooled down to 20c, the PID lets it get up to 22c, then turns on cooling again. This happens every few minutes (like 5) as the product cools down. I measured last week, and cooling 120kg of product inside the mixing machine from 75C to 28C took around 40 minutes from the moment I turned on cooling on the PID controller.

I contacted Trane, their representative came to our factory and they gave me an Excel calculator made for mixing vessels. You put in some numbers like mass off product, mass of vessel, start temp, desired product temp etc. then it gives you a "duty kW" in kW/hr at the end.

My problem is with cool down period. If I set 15 minutes (this is how long it takes for the jacket water to cool down from 75c to 20c, which is fine, i'd like to keep that) I get 14kw. But the 120kg of cream can't physically cool down in 15 minutes, due to the slower heat transfer between the jacket and the cream. If I set 40 minutes for cool down time, I get 5kw.

So i'm a bit lost on how to size the chiller for this application. It needs to be able to handle multiple machines. We have this 150l machine, there is a 75l machine on the way, and we're also planning another machine, but the size of that is not known yet.

I'm wondering if any of you has experience with this who could help me in sizing a chiller?

i need help asap my gas outlets have 0 flow, mass, molar and vol. If i cant have a value for this then j cant start the gas compression send help!

why can't they just distill into the desire product on a single tray instead having to pass multiple steps?

Work in a small manufacturing facility in the New England area where the cost of energy and regulation is only matched by California. at the moment we are purchasing one truck load of liquid nitrogen a week from Messer, they own the tank and the evaporator and we don't have to deal with the operation of the unit. I am wondering if anyone has experience running a PSA container-size unit for onsite N2 generation. How often do you guys change the media, compressor parts, babysitting, and troubleshooting the unit? can you guys please spill the beans? we use N2 for tank blanketing, and purging process equipment and piping.

Thank you very much for the responses I have received so far. Real altruism!

Hello guys, junior engineer here. I was given the task to install a control panel to inject chemicals for cooling tower water and design the suitable piping pathway and where should the chemicals be injected into the cooling tower system. I was thinking of just directly inject the chemicals into the cooling tower basin, but since the cooled water in the basin is stagnant, im afraid the chemicals will not mix well inside the basin. My supervisor suggested do the piping to that the chemicals are injected into the header at recirculation pump discharge side. The constraint with this idea is that the header is made of stainless steel, and the chemical piping is PVC. I would like to ask for any ideas or comment from you guys, especially for those who are working with cooling tower. Is there any industry standard on how to inject the chemicals into the cooling tower system?

In our plant's glycol system, we have a PRV at the top of a structure (about ~100ft up) that's set to 75 PSI relief pressure, it's purpose is to protect a vacuum pump that uses the glycol cooling. The glycol system has a pump at ground level. The pump is huge, supplying glycol for plant cooling via a ~12" pipe. During steady state operation the pressure of the glycol at the ground level is like 4-5 Bar. By the time it gets up to the very top of the structure the pipe is smaller and the pressure is probably way less, due to gravity and friction losses (no pressure gauges at the top of the structure though).

The PRV doesn't lift during normal operation but occasionally during pump startup the PRV lifts due to a surge of pressure at startup. This doesn't make sense to me because the pressure should still be reduced by the time it gets up to the top of a 100ft structure.

What options are there that can be put on an industrial sized system to reduce the pressure shock at startup? The closest thing to it I would say would be it's pipe hammer, but isn't that usually when flow is stopped and momentum keeps carrying it forward?

My initial thoughts:

- Soft start on the motor, would this even help? Don't industrial pump motors have some sort of built in slow startup process, since it's difficult to get hundreds of gallons of glycol flowing instantly in a pipe?

- surge tank/pipe hammer arrestor: I'm not sure if it is pipe hammer, but would it go down near the pump (would have to be huge) or would it go near the PRV for maximum efficiency?

What is your experience with similar systems?

I work in a facility which makes Polypropylene using UNIPOL process. The Fluidized bed reactor is heart of the process.

I want to model the reactor to predict the polymer properties like MFI, Isotacticity and also troubleshooting of problems like agglomeration and hotspots.

How do I proceed ahead. It seems impossible at this point because of complexity of zeigler natta reaction.

Hi , so i m in last year of clg and they are teaching us aspen plus but i want to learn more so i want guidance where can i learn more with better understanding tbh i m weak with thermodynamic so if they also teach on the way the reason for choosing certain method is a plus

Hi everyone! I have been doing outdoor climbing for quite a while, and recently I had an idea: could we create a no-water-needed cleanser that removes chalk(made of magnesium carbonate, used by climbers to keep hands dry for better grip) when soap and water aren't available?

The concept is kind of like hand sanitizer, but designed to:

-break down/ remove chalk

-moisturize the skin instead of drying it out

Since chalk is not water soluble, I've read that acid can dissolve it. But this creates a challenge:

-with too little acid, the chalk might not come off properly

-with too much acid, it could irritate already dry/damaged hands

It therefore made me wonder, is this even realistic, or does this idea sound a bit too good to be true? I'm not a chemical engineer by profession, so I would love to hear your thoughts. Is this a dumb idea or could it actually work with the right formulation?

Alright so I’ve been looking around for some documentation to explicitly state this but I haven’t seen anything super solid.

I believe that if a tank/pressure vessel/heat exchanger/filter is inside a building, it automatically gets evaluated for an external fire pressure relief scenario just because the building can go up in flames. Do we all agree with this?

Coming from a petrochemical complex background, everything is outside so we end up looking at equipment that contains flammables or equipment that is within 80ft of a flammable liquid and below 30ft.