The Sandvik Group’s expertise in sulphur solidification has been well established over many decades and its Rotoform system has now been installed at most of the world’s major refineries. On example is Hellenic Petroleum’s Elefsis refinery near Athens.

A Spanish refinery makes the best of its challenging location with state of the art wireless monitoring — A refinery never stands still: Hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil, fuel and petrochemicals are pumped back and forth each day. With stakes that high, valve monitoring becomes a crucial challenge. But what if the situation calls for a wireless solution? Discover, how process monitoring takes to the airwaves …

Nowadays, the most common way to obtain extremely fine particles from suspensions is a combination of spray drying followed by a subsequent grinding process. The grinding step is necessary because the product from a spray dryer is in the form of an agglomerate. To avoid the need for this two-step process and so reduce equipment costs, Nara has developed a different type of dryer.

At the beginning of the year, a large desalination plant was put into operation on Australia’s Gold Coast. It delivers 125 million liters of drinking water each day, which in this dry region corresponds to 20% of drinking water requirements. For this project, Nijhuis Pompen BV of Winterswijk — part of the Norit Group — delivered and installed 42 pumps. At the customer‘s request, some pumps use condition monitoring, where the vibrations are measured using sensors and measurement modules on the Wago-I/O-System.

Seamless documentation of all process values is required in order to further optimize processes and systems. Previously, far-away systems such as tank farms and pump stations could only be incorporated into the process automation with a large investment or not at all. The GSM network offers a simple solution to this problem if the safety criteria for areas subject to explosion are taken into account.

For the third time PROCESS chose the best product innovations in the industry at this year’s Powtech/TechnoPharm trade fair in Nuremberg/Germany. The judging panel selected the best entries from more than 50 nominations and presented awards in a prize-giving ceremony.

Italvacuum has manufactured vacuum pumps and vacuum dryers for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries since its establishment in 1939. The company supplies turnkey systems and bespoke equipment built to suit its customers’ needs.

Without the presence of “nothing,” literally nothing goes in many chemical processes. Whether for vaporization, sublimation, rectification, filtration, drying or conveying: Vacuum accelerates these process steps or is required to make them possible in the first place. Pfeiffer Vacuum has embodied a fascination for vacuum technology and its possibilities for more than 125 years.

The basic sealing task in mixing applications is to seal the rotating shaft as it passes through the vessel wall. Depending on the operating conditions — pressure, temperature, agitator speed, etc. — different types of seals are used. As this article shows, mechanical seals offer many advantages over other types of seals. Particularly if hazardous or explosive substances are being mixed, a mechanical seal is mandatory.

On a major part of the pump breakdowns in the Chemical Process Industry, the causes are NPSH problems, gas admixtures in the transported fluids, dry running or operating a pump outside the permitted range.