The November issue of The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering is now available. It features the official announcement of our lectureship award winner, Prof. Arun Ramachandran from University of Toronto. This issue also includes a new mini-review from our Experimental Methods in Chemical Engineering special series, this time focusing on specific surface area and pore size distribution measurements. In addition to 10 new regular articles, the November issue contains a special issue section with articles invited from the Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference in 2018.
This month’s issue highlights include four of the CCEC special issue section articles. In “Enhancement of petroleum coke thermal reactivity using oxy-cracking technique,” Abdallah D. Manasrah, Azfar Hassan, and Nashaat N. Nassar took up the question of whether oxy-cracked petroleum coke (petcoke) does mitigate some of the undesirable facets of regular petcoke, including reducing its sulphur and nitrogen contents. The authors from University of Calgary studied the thermal behaviour and combustion parameters of oxy-cracked petcoke using thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA). Ultimately, their research demonstrated that oxy-cracked petcoke does have a significantly lower nitrogen and sulphur content than virgin petcoke and that it can even have a lower ignition temperature.
The second issue highlight comes from a collaboration between authors at Université Laval and University of Tehran. This article, “Pressure-driven displacement flows of yield stress fluids: Viscosity ratio effects,” models the displacement flows of two miscible fluids, one Newtonian and one laminar. Of the five dimensionless numbers found to mainly govern the displacement flow, this article focused on the viscosity ratio (m). The authors demonstrate that slump-type/centre-type displacements are not dependent on lower values of m, but that higher values can help form the centre-type flows. Furthermore, this research concludes that no-back-flow regime formation can be caused by increasing m.
Researchers from Royal Military College published their article, “Assessment of commercial hydrate inhibitors using the 3-in-1 method” in this month’s issue of Can. J. Chem. Eng. Their innovative research seeks to solve the problem of needing multiple pieces of equipment and experimentation times for phase equilibria, kinetics, and morphology studies of gas hydrates. They developed a reactor and a novel method that can provide information on crystal morphology, apparent kinetics, and phase equilibria of gas hydrates all from a single experiment. By performing experiments on four commercial hydrate inhibitors, they validated the usefulness of this technique. This new technology makes the process of performing these assessments much more efficient, with it now requiring only hours to gather the data.
The final issue highlight features work from Devin J. O’Malley and Jan B. Haelssig out of Dalhousie University. Their article, “Multiscale modelling of mass transfer in gas jets and bubble plumes,” uses computational fluid dynamics to model the fluid dynamics and heat and mass transfer processes in complex systems seen in many industrial settings. They developed their model to use volume-of-fluid interface capturing where high mesh resolution was possible and the drift-flux or mixture model approximation with low mesh resolution. Comparing their simulated results with two published studies, allowed the researchers to validate this combined approach.