Description

The publication of the third edition of ‘Chemical Engineering Volume 3’ marks the completion of the re-orientation of the basic material contained in the first three volumes of the series. Volume 3 is devoted to reaction engineering (both chemical and biochemical), together with measurement and process control. This text is designed for students, graduate and postgraduate, of chemical engineering.

Volume 3 has now lost both Non-Newtonian Technology, which appears in abridged form in Volume 1, and the Chapter on Sorption Processes, which is now more logically located with the other Separation Processes in Volume 2. The Chapter on Computation has been removed. When Volume 3 was first published in 1972 computers were, by today’s standards, little more than in their infancy and students entering chemical engineering courses were not well versed in computational techniques. This situation has now completely changed and there is no longer a strong case for the inclusion of this topic in an engineering text book. With some reluctance the material on numerical solution of equations has also been dropped as it is more appropriate to a mathematics text.

In the new edition, the material on Chemical Reactor Design has been re-arranged into four chapters. The first covers General Principles (as in the earlier editions) and the second deals with Flow Characteristics and Modelling in Reactors. Chapter 3 now includes material on Catalytic Reactions (from the former Chapter 2) together with non-catalytic gas-solids reactions, and Chapter 4 covers other multiphase reactor systems. Dr J. C. Lee has contributed the material in Chapters 1, 2 and 4 and that on non-catalytic reactions in Chapter 3, and Professor W. J. Thomas has covered catalytic reactions in that Chapter.

Chapter 5, on Biochemical Engineering, has been completely rewritten in two sections by Dr R. L. Lovitt and Dr M. G. Jones with guidance from the previous author, Professor B. Atkinson. The earlier part deals with the nature of reaction processes controlled by micro-organisms and enzymes and is prefaced by background material on the relevant microbiology and biochemistry. In the latter part, the process engineering principles of biochemical reactors are discussed, and emphasis is given to those features which differentiate them from the chemical reactors described previously.

The concluding two chapters by Dr A. P. Wardle deal, respectively, with Measurement, and Process Control. The former is a completely new chapter describing the various in-line techniques for measurement of the process variables which constitute the essential inputs to the control system of the plant. The last chapter gives an updated treatment of the principles and applications of process control and concludes with a discussion of computer control of process plant.