Relief Valve Sizing with Real Gases
Very often, in chemical engineering, the line between problems one can solve one’s self, with code or more often than not in a spreadsheet, and problems that...
Posts by Year
2024
Modeling Hydrogen Releases Using HyRAM+
Continuing on a series of posts on hydrogen of sorts, this post is on modeling hydrogen releases for risk assessment. Industry in many places, and in Alberta...
Plastics Recycling and Microplastics: Checking the Math
As perhaps just a hazard of my profession, any time an article comes out on the merits (or lack of) of recycling and plastic waste in general, people send it...
Engineering a Cup of Coffee Part Two: Espresso
In a previous post I thought about how one might approach making coffee, in a French press, as a chemical engineering problem. The obvious next step is to lo...
Estimating the impact of fugitive hydrogen
As Alberta continues down it’s path to the hydrogen economy, with more industrial facilities transitioning to hydrogen as a fuel, and more producers of hydro...
2023
Impossible bowling
While bowling, this week, an interesting question came up: is it possible to get every score from 1 to 450 in a game of five pin bowling? Or, to flip it arou...
Messing around with model parameters
Recently I added some alternative correlations to GasDispersion.jl, the julia package I put together for basic chemical release modeling, and I thought it wo...
Engineering a Cup of Coffee
While making coffee one day, I started thinking about how the coffee making process is both a perfect representation of the sorts of systems chemical enginee...
Monitoring smoke infiltration
A few years ago I mused about using wildfire smoke events to measure the infiltration rate of buildings, in the context of modeling the infiltration of air p...
Taking a second look at the Britter-McQuaid model
I recently spent some time looking in detail at the Britter-McQuaid workbook model for dense gas dispersion and I thought the plume model deserved some extra...
Integrating a Gaussian puff - mistakes were made
The other day I was working on a project involving Gaussian puff models and I noticed that I had made a significant mistake, a mistake I have made several ti...
2022
Dynamic Mode Decomposition
Recently I’ve been playing around with Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD) and this notebook compiles my notes and julia code in one place for later reference.
Hydrogen Blending
November this year came in with a bang where I live: the temperature outside is currently -20°C, there is a pile of snow, and suddenly staying in and staying...
Adiabatic Compressible Flow in a Pipe
I was looking through some books and it struck me how strangely inconsistent many standard references are when it comes to adiabatic compressible pipe flow. ...
Between a puff and a plume
In previous examples I used both Gaussian plume and puff models for continuous and instantaneous releases, respectively, but what about the in-between cases?...
More on Turbulent Jets
Previously I worked through the velocity profiles for turbulent jets and left off claiming that everything else of interest followed simply from those profil...
Turbulent Jets
In a previous post I worked through a chemical release modeled as a turbulent jet and while I mentioned there were several ways modeling the jet, I didn’t go...
2021
The 2021 Canadian Federal Election
On Monday, September 20 2021, Canadians went to the polls and ended up electing a parliament that looked very much like the one we had in August, prior to th...
Smoke Days
Recently wildfire smoke has returned and blanketed the city in haze, causing the air quality health index (AQHI) to sky rocket, and as a result I’ve been spe...
Building Infiltration Example – Chlorine Release
In a previous notebook, I explored building infiltration due to forest fire smoke and noted that ambient conditions would impact the scenario, in this scenar...
Building Infiltration Example
A common part of emergency planning is the shelter in place. More often than not trying to outrun whatever calamity is happening at a chemical plant is more ...
Turbulent Jet Example
In previous examples I discussed release scenarios involving vapour clouds spreading over a large area, carried by the wind. In those examples the momentum o...
VCE Example - Butane Vapour Cloud
In a previous post I worked through estimating the airborne quantity of butane due to a leak from a storage sphere. That example stopped at estimating the to...
2020
Worst Case Meterological Conditions
In a previous post I modeled an example of a plume from an elevated stack. In that example I assumed very stable conditions and a low windspeed – pasquill st...
Air Dispersion Example - Stack Emissions
This is an interesting example that came up in conversation with another engineer related to a construction project happening at an existing facility. Imagin...
Compressible Flow Example - Sizing a goose neck vent
When determining the required venting for aboveground storage tanks it is typical to calculate normal and emergency vent rates using standards such as API 20...
Chemical Release Screening Example - Butane leak
A routine practice of process safety is to model scenarios for different chemiccal hazards present at a plant. Often there are more plausible scenarios than ...