The chemical industry represents a 455-billion-dollar-a-year business, with
products ranging from cosmetics, to fuel products, to plastics, to pharmaceuticals,
health care products, food additives, and many others. It is diverse and dynamic,
with market sectors rapidly expanding, and in turmoil in many parts of the world.
Across these varied industry sectors, basic unit operations and equipment are
applied on a daily basis, and indeed although there have been major technological
innovations to processes, many pieces of equipment are based upon a foundation of
engineering principles developed more than 50 years ago.
The Handbook of Chemical Processing Equipment has been written as a basic
reference for process engineers. It provides practical information on the working
principles and engineering basis for major equipment commonly used throughout
the chemical processing and allied industries. Although written largely with the
chemical engineer in mind, the book’s contents are general enough, with sufficient
background and principles described, that other manufacturing and process
engineers will find it useful.
The handbook is organized into eight chapters. Chapters 1 through 3 deal with heat
transfer equipment used in a variety of industry applications ranging from process
heat exchange, to evaporative cooling, to drying and solvent recovery applications,
humidity control, crystallization, and others. Chapters 4 and 5 cover stagewise
mass transfer equipment. Specifically, Chapter 4 covers distillation, and Chapter 5
covers classical mass transfer equipment involving absorption, adsorption,
extraction, and membrane technologies. Chapter 6 discusses equipment used in
mass separation based upon physical or mechanical means. This includes such
equipment topics as sedimentation, centrifugal separation, filtrations methods.
Chapter 7 covers mixing equipment and various continuous contacting devices
such as gas-solids fluidized beds. Finally, Chapter 8 provides the reader with a
compendium of short calculation methods for commonly encountered process
operations. The calculation methods are readily set up on a personal computer’s
standard software spreadsheet.
Select references are provided in each chapter for more in-depth coverage of an
equipment subject, including key Web sites that offer vendor-specific information
and equipment selection criteria. In a number of chapters, sample calculations are
provided to guide the reader through the use of design and scale-up formulas that
are useful in preparing equipment specifications or in establishing preliminary
Although the author has taken great care to ensure that the information presented in
this volume is accurate, neither he nor the publisher will endorse or guarantee any
designs based upon materials provided herein. The author wishes to thank
Butterworth-Heinemann Publishers for their fine production of this volume.