Chemical industry | EPFL Graph Search

The chemical industry comprises the companies that develop and produce industrial, specialty and other chemicals. Central to the modern world economy, it converts raw materials (oil, natural gas, air, water, metals, and minerals) into industrial and consumer products. The plastics industry contains some overlap, as some chemical companies produce plastics as well as chemicals. Various professionals are involved in the chemical industry including chemical engineers, chemists and lab technicians. History Although chemicals were made and used throughout history, the birth of the heavy chemical industry (production of chemicals in large quantities for a variety of uses) coincided with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Industrial Revolution One of the first chemicals to be produced in large amounts through industrial processes was sulfuric acid. In 1736 pharmacist Joshua Ward developed a process for its production that involved heating sulfur with saltpeter

Application of Exergy Analysis in Energy Requirements Assay of the Typical Process Unit Operations of Chemical Industries

Amélie Courjon

This project proposes a method based on exergy analysis for considering energy efficiency problems. Because exergy is not a concept frequently used by industrials attention has been paid to go through what is exergy and how it can be so useful to enhance the use of available resources. A case study has been taken from a real plant from the chemical industry. A particular attention has been paid to the typical unit operations that are encountered in chemical plants. Unit operations of different types have been submitted to exergy analysis. In particular, the impact of operating conditions around each type of equipment has been highlighted. A systematic approach has been lead to identify new potentials for exergy recovery. Combined with pinch analysis the exergy approach has proved a very powerful tool to enhance exergy recovery between process streams. 58% of the process internal exergy losses have been recovered while Aspen tool for column thermal targeting analysis helps finding new parameters that reduce column internal losses by 60% and its energy requirement by 21%.

2012

Building Capabilities for Service Innovation

Andreas Felix von Vangerow

The service sector is the most dominant sector in every developed economy today. The ability to develop and successfully launch new services is crucial for service organizations to stay competitive and to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the environment. However, up until now, a mismatch remains between the importance of service innovation for society and the attention given to it in both academia and practice. Existing research has compared the innovative output of service firms with manufacturing firms and found that the difference is one of degree rather than of substance. Studies which focus on the process instead of the output of service innovation, however, are still relatively scarce. This dissertation aims to help close this research gap by examining three service innovation processes in different contexts. First, it offers a theoretical illumination of service innovation with the help of knowledge creation theory. This is beneficial for defining service innovation more precisely. The second study is concerned with the influence of emotional factors on the development of dynamic capabilities in new ventures. It shows that young ventures which are able to deliberately switch between emotional and analytical modes of operation have a higher likelihood of success. The study compares the development of two service-oriented ventures with two product-oriented ones that are part of an accelerator program at the School of Design Thinking at Stanford University. The third paper is concerned with product-service strategies, or Servitization, and the relation to vertical integration and the coordination of innovation in downstream markets. The study shows that the Servitization development, i.e. the vertical integration of manufacturing firms into its users' operation, is a response to the failure of architectural innovation in more flexible buyer-supplier relationships. The study finds four different strategies for the service business of manufacturing firms based on case studies in the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and chemical industries. Overall, I am able to show that firms need to be able to build three distinct capabilities to master their service innovation efforts. First, they need to build up a capacity for innovation to gain economies from partial repetition of solutions. Second, firms need to have skills in place to create and manage boundary objects, especially at the client interface. Finally, they need to have capabilities to build up complementarities which help protect revenues from their service innovation initiatives.

EPFL2015

Helio-photocatalytic enhancement of the biodegradation of biorecalcitrant pollutants in water

Simeon Kenfack

The importance of the photocatalytic treatment of water is continuously growing since the 80s. In spite of the well management of the existing biological water treatment plants and the constant reinforcement of the wastewater discharge standards, the development of new water depolluting processes among which the photocatalysis is still relevant. It is recognized that certain chemicals mostly from the synthetic chemistry are not or could only be biodegradable under very critical conditions. When these "biorecalcitrant" pollutants are rejected in a biological wastewater treatment plant, they very often cross it without being degraded and thus, they accumulate in the environment and/or in the living beings. Some of them like the phthalates and the pesticides are known for their carcinogenic and mutagen effects or, they induce hormonal disruptions in the animals, including humans. In general, all the Advanced Oxidation Processes (AOP) whose characteristic is to generate hydroxyls radicals (OH) are able to degrade most of the organic molecules including the biorecalcitrant chemicals. As a technology using the photons emitted by a light source to excite a catalyst and facilitate the generation of the 'OH radicals, the photocatalysis would be a more environmental compatible and less expensive process for depolluting such chemicals, if the light source is natural: the sun. For the first time, a study of potential application in the field of helio- photocatalysis was explored in a sub-Saharan Africa country (Burkina Faso), making profitable the significant solar radiation present in that country, to validate certain results obtained using appropriated experimental and analytical methods at the Laboratory for Environmental Biotechnology (LBE) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The main objective of this thesis was to contribute to evaluate some physicochemical and technical rules which guide the scaling up processing of the helio-photo-Fenton process. To achieve this, the work was organized in several phases of laboratory work at the EPFL and field apply work at the Ecole Inter-Etats d'Ingénieurs de l'Equipement Rural (EIER) of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. To mitigate the deficit of sophisticated analytical material during the field work's periods, a simple analytical method requiring relatively modest equipment was developed and validated in the laboratory and on the field. This thesis is organized in 5 chapters of which the first focuses on the problems of this research and presents the fundamental principles of the photocatalytic processes. Chapter 2 presents the systematic development of a low cost analytical method built up and validated in the laboratory for field's applied studies on three phthalates: the dimethyl phthalate (DMP), the diethyl phthalate (DEP) and the Diallyl phthalate (DAP). The chapter 3 focuses on the study of the optimal parameters influencing the helio-photodegradation of the DEP. In the chapter 4, two case studies on the enhancement of the biodegradability of some biorecalcitrants wastewaters of which, the first evaluates the possibility of integrating the photocatalysis into a global strategy of managing the effluents of a chemical industry and the other treat problem of the depollution of the water polluted by a pesticide are presented. The last chapter presents some modelling approaches allowing to evaluate the solar UVA energy (needed for the helio-photocatalysis) basing on the equation of the solar UVA irradiation which was proposed and tested with the one year solar data of Ouagadougou.

EPFL2006