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• Energy Hog Restricts Plant Production Rates

  By Earl Clark, Energy Columnist

  The plant was operating at less than 30% production, but the refrigeration system still was at capacity and barely keeping up. What was going on?When product demand dropped, the East Plant was shut down and the West Plant began operating at reduced rates. Yet, the massive refrigeration plant was…

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• Online Monitoring Optimizes Polymerization Processes

  By Grant Heard and Scott Meikle, Nalco Water, and Alex W. Reed and Michael F. Drenski, Fluence Analytics

  While makers of commodity polymers generally rely on high-throughput continuous processes, many specialty polymer manufacturers use batch processes. This meets customer requirements for flexibility in making a wide range of products on time without changes to the plant infrastructure. In addition,…

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• Prevent Suction Piping Problems

  By Amin Almasi, mechanical equipment consultant

  Piping issues can directly affect a pump’s performance and life. Poorly designed suction piping can result in pump damage and even failure. Quite bluntly, there’s no excuse for substandard piping design.Numerous guidelines and mandates in the technical literature, textbooks, manuals, codes,…

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• Get New Workers Up to Speed on Liquid Analysis

  By Jason Dalebroux, Emerson Automation Solutions

  Retiring chemical industry workers taking with them a wealth of knowledge on every aspect of industrial process management and control is a familiar story. The latest generation of workers is more digital savvy but, as most chemical plant managers know, computer knowledge doesn’t always help new…

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• Chemical Processing Economic Snapshot Ending May 2018

   

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• Process Equipment: Improve Mixer Performance

  By David S. Dickey, MixTech, Inc.

  Many processors rely on mixing equipment that is more than 25 years old. Even if the equipment isn’t worn out, it almost certainly was designed for different conditions and often different processes or products. The design may not suit the current application or product. In the last 25 years,…

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