Technical stuff for my blog.
Introduction Process engineers are concerned about safety, and we spend a lot of our time considering overpressure protection. A simple example is thermal expansion of a blocked in heat exchanger. The cold cold side warms up, the cold fluid expands a tiny bit and the exchanger ruptures. The solution is to install a small PSV…
I was digging through an old hard drive and found something that made me smile. It was a GIF animation that I created 20 years ago (give or take a few weeks). No, not something with the qualities to go viral. This was the continuation of simulation work that I did for my PhD thesis.…
A variable frequency drive is often used to control the flow rate for a centrifugal pump. We can save power by adjusting the pump speed to control flow rate. But this method does not work in all applications. This video explains where a VFD works, and where it doesn’t.
Pipeline supply pumps must meet an interesting set of operating conditions. The flow rate is generally low and the required discharge pressure is high. This requires either a small multistage centrifugal pump or a positive displacement pump, such as a plunger pump. A plunger pump with a VFD is quite suitable for delivering fluid to a pipeline. However,…