Unraveling the effect of variable natural gas feedstock on an industrial ammonia process

Ammonia plays critical role as the second most produced chemical commodity with around 80% used in producing nitrogen-based fertilizer. Considering the decline of reserves of fossil-based feedstocks it is imperative to shift towards greener alternatives. However, such green ammonia processes are far from being economically viable. This makes...

Novel intensified process for ethanolamines production using reactive distillation and dividing-wall column technologies

Monoethanolamine is an essential chemical used as feedstock in the production of detergents, emulsifiers, pharmaceuticals, polishes, corrosion inhibitors, and chemical intermediates. It is produced industrially by treating ethylene oxide with aqueous ammonia, but the reaction also leads to di- and tri-ethanolamine as less desired by-products....

Enhanced process for energy efficient extraction of 1,3-butadiene from a crude C4 cut

1,3-butadiene is an essential platform chemical for producing rubberlike polymers, which is extracted from C₄ hydrocarbons that are produced through steam cracking. The current state-of-the-art technology is the BASF process that uses thermally coupled extractive distillation (ED) followed by two distillation columns. However, the...

Effectiveness of energy renovations: a reassessment based on actual consumption savings

Energy renovations offer unique opportunities to increase the energy efficiency of the built environment and for the existing housing stock; they are the most important solution. Usually, energy savings are based on modeling calculations. However, recent research has shown that the predicted energy consumption differs largely from the actual...

Assessing the residential energy rebound effect by means of a serious game

Residential energy efficiency improvements often have a smaller effect than expected. Although there is agreement on the existence of this effect, called the rebound effect, there is no agreement on the size of the effect. The objective of this study was to investigate the potential of using serious games to assess this effect. We used a game...

Green operations of belt conveyors by means of speed control

Belt conveyors can be partially loaded due to the variation of bulk material flow loaded onto the conveyor. Speed control attempts to reduce the belt conveyor energy consumption and to enable the green operations of belt conveyors. Current research of speed control rarely takes the conveyor dynamics into account so that speed control lacks...