TY - JOUR AB - AbstractThe trend of increasing product diversity and decreasing production amounts led to the requirement of higher flexibility of production processes of specialty chemicals. Conventional distillation columns, mostly equipped with structured packings, lack the flexibility to handle product changeovers and throughput. Thus, a newly designed distillation column for specialty chemicals is presented. A numerical model was implemented to analyze the potential of the wetted‐wall column. The simulation of the distillation of a binary methanol/water mixture demonstrated that the wetted‐wall column can generate the desired concentration and temperature profiles. Furthermore, analyses of the pressure drop and separation efficiency with the test system chlorobenzene/ethylbenzene were conducted. AU - Reitze, Arnulf AU - Grünewald, Marcus AU - Riese, Julia ID - 47569 IS - 7 JF - Chemical Engineering & Technology KW - Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering KW - General Chemical Engineering KW - General Chemistry SN - 0930-7516 TI - Concept of a Flexible Wetted‐Wall Column for the Distillation of Specialty Chemicals VL - 44 ER - TY - JOUR AB - AbstractShortened product life cycles and increased demand for specialized products lead to more challenges in efficiently satisfying customer needs. Customer demands are increasingly uncertain in terms of type, location, and volume. As a result, more flexible chemical production plants are required. Modular small‐scale plants can be installed in transportation containers and, therefore, offer the flexibility of easy relocation, enabling production close to the customer or supplier. In a mathematical optimization model, the economic benefit of small‐scale plants in the specialty chemicals market of polymer production is analyzed. Different scenarios created from the real data of a chemical company show that the use of small‐scale plants may lead to a significant reduction in total costs that is mainly due to the transportation costs of raw materials and products. AU - Bruns, Bastian AU - Becker, Tristan AU - Riese, Julia AU - Lier, Stefan AU - Werners, Brigitte ID - 47570 IS - 6 JF - Chemical Engineering & Technology KW - Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering KW - General Chemical Engineering KW - General Chemistry SN - 0930-7516 TI - Efficient Production of Specialized Polymers with Highly Flexible Small‐Scale Plants VL - 44 ER - TY - JOUR AB - The highly efficient filtration of ultrafine dust emitted by biomass combustion processes with a baghouse filter has been successfully tested in the last years. To protect the filter material from the very small and sticky fine dust particles and to guarantee very high total collection efficiencies (> 99 %) in a long-term stable process, the use of a precoat is necessary. Tests done in a laboratory and a real-application plant show that the reuse of precoat materials can lead to significant savings. Considering the influences of different combustion processes, the associated precoat efficiencies could be calculated. With these characteristic ratios, it is possible to evaluate different process settings. Hence, the amount and the cost of the needed precoat could be reduced significantly. AU - Schiller, Sascha AU - Hellmich, Christoph AU - Schmid, Hans-Joachim ID - 26108 JF - Chemical Engineering & Technology SN - 0930-7516 TI - Evaluation of the Efficiency of Filtration Processes Using Precoat Materials ER - TY - JOUR AB - Ultrafine dust separation from different sources like industry, traffic, or private households has become increasingly important in the last decade. A compact baghouse filter system has been developed which is suitable for pellet heaters. For filtration, a precoat material is required to prevent clogging of the filter media by the ultrafine dust particles. In order to ensure the best performance of this filter system, different combinations of filter media and precoat materials, e.g., grade efficiencies and the cake area load for the various filter media, were investigated in a special test rig. With this highly efficient technology, extremely high separation efficiencies of > 99 % and ultrafine dust concentrations of > 1 mg cm−3 could be reached in a long-term stable process. AU - Schiller, Sascha AU - Schmid, Hans-Joachim ID - 26126 JF - Chemical Engineering & Technology SN - 0930-7516 TI - Ultrafine Dust Filtration Using Precoat Materials Considering the Influence of Filter Media ER -