If you have to enforce it, it’s not a secret anymore, is it?
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Sounds amazing. So biomass to crude/high quality oil not isolate or disty. 
That’s a smart assumption to make, but in this case you are incorrect. Our output is a refined product, not a crude one.
Thats why I said high quality oil that would be high TAC like a membrane color remediation especislly the low power you guys saying.
Would be cool to see always enjoy your knowledgable posts bro! Keep it up
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This book’s pages re made of same paper as Bible pages. A bible for sure, has a permanent place on my desk, always open. This book is better than a google rabbithole most of the time. It is the word
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Peep the literature section of the Data Dump. There’s quite a few more scrolls in their to complement your bible
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Yup, I like to wander though the Dump on occasion, just to see what I can see. I’ve found some real gems in there.
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There is some really good info in there. Especially Chapter 0.
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Thank you for the hint. Looks like an excellent book. Anything you recommend of course is sure to be great.
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With a title like “The Scale-Up Bible” I was expecting a little more than Perry’s. Yes, its a vital piece in any chemical engineer’s library. But, its primarily data sets, tables, in-depth explanations about why one gasket is good for pressure and another for vacuum in terms of their spring constants, molecular rates of dispersion in an adsorber, and other things you might consider the nitty-gritty of engineering. Don’t get me wrong, Perry’s is and will always be Perry’s - it is necessary. But as a standalone, without any context or background information for a non-engineer its little more than a 20 pound paperweight.
Fuck. I had been meaning to do the Eyeworm’s Finest Engineering Book Recommendation List for an even shittier year but now that its come up. This list is in no way inclusive, because frankly there is no one Bible and the knowledge you’d need to be pilot plant Jesus would take a lifetime.
So the first three are actually where everyone should start - I wish someone handed me these as a senior year undergraduate because they are the bridge between the academic theory I had been taught and the practical application of those understandings to design safe and efficient processes.
(i) The Pilot Plant Real Book - Francis McConville
This is THE place to start if you’re just walking into a plant fresh out the bugatti. If you look closely, this is in John Wick’s bug-out chest just in case. An excellent mix of easy-to-read-for-beginners and I-can-apply-this-daily as a seasoned plant engineer or process chemist. You’ll find here the basics of equipment operation, heat transfer, types of instrumentation, solvent properties, explanation of azeotropes and vapor/liquid equilibrium (hereon, VLE), effects of pH, liquid and gas handling, and much more. A ton of the questions that have sent you to the library these past few years may have been cleared up in 10% of the time by this book alone. Best part is, its like 250 pages so you could easily rip a 30 mg adderal one rainy day and come out of it 100x better at your work.
(ii) A Working Guide to Process Equipment - Norman & Elizabeth Lieberman
Truly a process engineering power couple. Between the two of them is something like 80 years of experience troubleshooting and optimizing refineries. In this book you’ll find down to earth explanations and insightful anecdotes for the design/selection, operation and troubleshooting of just about all common types of equipment - distillation operation principles, instrumentation and controls, steam systems, VLE, condensers, thermodynamics, heat exchangers (lots of information ya’ll SHOULD know if you have a shell/tube!!), refrigeration, pumps, reaction equilibria, pressure relief, corrosion/fouling, and some fluid flow dynamics in pipes. This isn’t a book you’re likely to read cover to cover; you’ll probably just read the chapters you need when you need them. But whether you know it or not, you’ve already needed something found in this book to troubleshoot an issue, or purchase the right tool for some job at some point in your careers.
(iii) Inherently Safer Chemical Processes: A Lifecyle Approach - Bollinger, et al.
This shoulda been numba 1 to me. This book is an ode to Trevor Kletz - an engineer to whom we should all be thankful for founding the philosophy of inherent process safety. We’ll get to him later down the line, but this book is a definitive expansion of his philosophy on how to make decisions during the process design stages that minimize or eliminate hazards, risks, and material losses in day to day operation. Every chemist and chemical engineer should read this, and frankly its very easy to read and understand. This book will help you identify the hazards in your processes and determine whether they’re characteristics of the materials/chemistry being used (flammability, toxicity, reactivity, corrosive) or are they characteristics of the process variables (pressure, temperature). Once identified, you will learn a systematic approach to avoid the worst case scenarios from occurring.
This book will help you reduce the frequency or consequences of potential accidents in your chemical processes. Read this book, and every time you hire someone for management/engineering make them read it too.
(iv) Plant Design for Safety: A User-Friendly Approach - Trevor Kletz
Without a doubt, Trevor Kletz is a rockstar as far as the chemical processing industry is concerned. He developed the practice Hazard and Operability Studies (HAZOP), a topic which is now taught in universities worldwide and on which scores of books have been written. If you’re a seasoned chemical engineer reading this, you may understand the implications of this man’s contribution to process safety. He was a pioneer who provided the first clear and concise discussion of the concept of inherent process safety in 1977 with his lecture “What You Don’t Have, Can’t Leak.” Since then, he’s been considered a process safety guru. This book will help you make the design choices required to build a manufacturing environment that is safe and tolerant of both human error and equipment failure without sacrificing efficiency and throughput. What else do I have to say?
(v) Transport Processes and Separation Process Principles - Christie John Geankoplis
I don’t care what you heard down at the bodega, but this is THE textbook for separation processes. Frankly, a million times more useful than Perry’s and not nearly as soul-crushing. This is what you want to grab if you want to be as knowledgeable as an undergraduate chemical engineer worth their salt on these topics: heat/mass transfer, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and pretty much EVERY style of separation (distillation, adsorption, absorption, mechanical, membrane, drying/evaporation, gas/liquid, liquid/vapor, liquid/liquid, fluid/solid, et al.). Straight up, this has just about everything I need from all 4 years of undergraduate work summed up into 1000 or so pages. For some bullshit reason, every University issues you Separation Process Engineering by Philip Wankat (which you SHOULD also own), but this is way easier to read, and is much more exhaustive. Professors will tell you Wankat, veteran chemE’s will tell you Geankoplis - I’m telling you both. The disclaimer is that you will require the threshold capacity and math/science foundation to comprehend and apply what’s in this book. You need to know some calculus, you need to know viscosity is the resistance to flow whereas density is the mass that fits in a volume, you need to know viscosity and density don’t depend on each other but both depend on temperature, you need to know metric/english units, you need to know that a Watt is a unit of power equal to one Joule per second (J/s), you need to know that a Joule is a unit of work/energy defined as 1 Newton of force through a length of 1 Meter (i.e. N*m, or kg m^2/s^2), you need to know a Newton is the force required to accelerate 1 kg of mass by 1 meter per second squared (kg m/s^2). Geankoplis does take the time to hit these basics and that’s why he’s worth your affections. The book begins with the definitions of force, fluid statics, energy, momentum, gas laws, energy balances, unit conversions. But it quickly becomes the theory and design equations used to size separation equipment.
(vi) Flow of Fluids Through Vales, Fittings, and Pipe - Crane Co. Engineering Dept. Technical Paper No. 410
The day was always going to come in our lives where we needed a fluid to flow from A to B. This isn’t a pleasure read by any means, its meant to provide you the theory of flow in a pipe. You’ll learn how to use Bernoulli’s Equation, calculate friction factors, compressibility, understand how and why your fluid in insulated lines heats up by a degree Celsius every 10 feet of run length, application of flow regime/Reynold’s number to selecting the correct pipe diameter, pressure drop and its relationship to flow velocity, and most of the fundamentals of fluid dynamics. There are also some data sets and fluid properties data tables - but if you have Perry’s you’re more than covered.
Those are all I have time for, but here are some more valuable additions to your library. Lucky for us, all the titles are fairly indicative of the topics therein:
- Chemical Engineering Design: Principles, Practice, and Economics of Plant and Process Design - Towler
- Improving Chemical Engineering Practices: A new look at old myths of the chemical industry - Trevor Kletz
- What Went Wrong? - Trevor Kletz
- Still Going Wrong! - Trevor Kletz
- HAZOP and HAZAN - Trevor Kletz
- Modern Vacuum Practice - Nigel Harris
- Product & Process Design Principles - Seider, Seader and Lewin
- Dimensional Analysis and Scale Up in Chemical Engineering - Zlokarnik (haven’t read but comes highly recommended for this topic!)
- Distillation Design and Distillation Operation - Kister (caveat: these books are BOTH written as if you read the other one first. They insist on each other in a way that doesn’t really make sense, and its more in depth than you’d need to just run a WFE. They are the gold standard for industrial scale column distillation, however)
Thanks for reading.
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@Soxhlet, @TwistedStill and I are all thankful I’m sure that machinists have a Bible with the Machinists Handbook. Probably deserves a spot on the list of engineering tomes because it’s important to know how you’re going to actually build the skid you dream up
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pipefitters blue book by W.V. Graves deserves some recognition as well
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I’m really thankful that my post prodded you into posting this. I’ve got a lot of reading to do!
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Very good rec’s eyeworm! Im a book hoarder, and theres a few on your list that are new to me, Thank You!!
Norm and Liz Lieberman are legends, Norm a special breed and has been a huge influence on my professional development. Im excited to get the Real Book you shared - looks like a real good one to have on hand.
I will add book rec:
Industrial Sampling Systems by Tony Waters. - cant pirate it since its published by Swagelok. Its written for folks at all stages of their career speaking to everyone from service techs to engineers and applies to sampling systems and beyond in regards to hydraulic and pneumatic system design and control.
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Can’t pirate it because they already give it out for free?
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The real book is something worth having a hard copy of, the digital copies I’ve found have been kind of jenkily scanned in.
Norm has a good section on controlling column pressure with a hot vapor bypass of the condenser, which is applicable to the condenser used directly after a recovery pump on a hydrocarbon system (if you assume the action provided by the separator/compressor is synonymous to a reboiler supplying hot vapors to the top of a distillation column).
I’m unfamiliar with industrial sampling, and I’m sure that its a blindspot in my knowledge - thank you for the suggestion. But, information like that I often rely on vendors to sort of fill me in on as I go - which is probably why Swage was behind such a publication.
Sampling supply/equipment vendors I’ve vetted IRL are:
Sampling Supplies USA
Famat
Jaygo Inc.
You can find yourself sanitary sampling wands/sample thieves and sampling valve components between those three depending on what your situation calls for. I actually made a huge index of vendors in my bookmarks and included key words of products they sell, so anytime I need some component I just type that word into my bookmarks tab and get like 10 vendor suggestions haha. But, that index took hours and hours to make what it is now including several chemical equipment conventions and countless phone calls with reps.
I’m glad you found some of what I posted useful!
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by the way, thanks for adding the libgen links. good looks!
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Encyclopedia also works.
Perry’s got me through some of the tougher chemical engineering work I’ve done.
It’s an invaluable resource.
Edit: Another great resource “Analysis, Synthesis, and Design of Chemical Processes” it was basically a culmination of all aspect of ChemE seen through a lens of finances and construction.
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