Bulk chemicals are used to describe chemical products that are manufactured in many tones/year. In addition to petrochemicals they include such chemicals as caustic soda, titanium dioxide for paint whitening and many others. Typically the basic raw materials and naturally occurring and the continuous manufacturing processes are large and designed to extract the key material from the natural ore. Given that the ore is naturally occurring and stable extraction often involves high temperatures and large amounts of energy. A continuous reactor is used followed by separation processes such as distillation columns, counter current extraction and others.

The industry faces a number of challenges:-

  • Raw materials are becoming scarce and expensive
  • Energy costs are rising
  • It is not acceptable to discharge waste products into rivers, the sea or the air.
  • Ensure recyclables

Yet demand continues to rise as the products provide the basic building blocks to the rapidly growing economies of the world. The result is ever growing pressures for improved control of all stages of extraction, manufacture and recycles. Measurement is essential to this control and historically has been difficult since much of the ores are complex solids and flows are often two or three phase.

Process tomography can provide information for process development, process diagnostics and process control over a range of unit processes:

  • mixing in a wide variety of processes, such as static mixers, jet mixing, batch mixing and blending
  • flow of multiphase systems, including phase inversion, flow characterisation
  • separation, such as filtration, liquid-liquid separation, chromatography and other packed columns
  • reactions, such as crystallisation, hydrogenation and polymerisation.  In addition process tomography can provide information on homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis

Register or click on applications and solutions related content on the right to access further information on how Tomography can help your industry.

Publications:

M.J.H. Simmons, I. Edwards, J.F. Hall, X. Fan, D.J. Parker and E.H. Stitt (2009) Techniques for visualisation of cavern boundaries in opaque industrial mixing systems, AIChE Journal, Vol. 55, No. 11

Holden, PJ, Wang, M, Mann, R, Dickin, FJ and Edwards, RB (1999) On Detecting Mixing Pathologies Inside a Stirred Vessel using Electrical Resistance Tomography, Trans IChemE, Vol. 77, Part A, November 1999, pp 709-712

Bolton, Hooper, Mann and Stitt (2004) Flow distribution and velocity measurement in a radial flow fixed bed
reactor using electrical resistance Tomography, Chemical Engineering Science, Vol. 59, No. 10, pp 1989-1997

For more information about this paper, please contact ITS.

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