Simulated moving bed technology: principles, design and process applications Book uri icon

abstract

  • This book is a result of more than 20 years research on Simulated Moving Bed (SMB) processes at the Laboratory of Separation and Reaction Engineering (LSRE) and teaching at undergraduate level at the Department of Chemical Engineering (ChE), Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto (FEUP), graduate courses at Technical University (TU) Eindhoven and TU Delft, and an in-house course for Companhia Petroquímica do Nordeste (COPENE) (now Brazchem) and Petrogal. I graduated in ChE at University of Porto (U. Porto) in 1968, having never heard about SMB during those years. I heard about PAREX (and other Sorbex processes) in Nancy during my thesis work (1970e1973) with P. Le Goff and D. Tondeur. I found the idea of SMBdturning fixed-bed operation into continuous processesda bright one. After my African endeavors (teaching at the University of Luanda in Angola and military service there), I landed again at FEUP in August 1976 as an Assistant Professor. An optional course on Petroleum Refining for Chemical Engineering (ChE) was offered to undergraduate students given by Lopes Vaz from Petrogal. He was working in Lisbon but coming to Porto every Saturday morning to teach that course. I asked permission to attend. Lopes Vaz was a very good lecturer. It was an opportunity to learn details of the PAREX unit existing in the aromatics plant in the Refinery of Petrogal in Matosinhos. After the Revolution of April 1974, FEUP began offering evening courses allowing people with a “technical engineer” degree to get a diploma of Chemical Engineering (ChE) from U. Porto by following an additional two-year program. One of my students at that time was Soares Mota working for Petrogal and taking care of the PAREX unit. In 1978, I organized my first NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on “Percolation Processes: Theory and Applications.” One of the lecturers I invited was D. Broughton from UOP (one of the inventors of SMB). He could not come, but instead A. De Rosset lectured in that ASI. I had the opportunity to travel to Des Plaines (Illinois) to visit Universal Oil Products (UOP) and meet D. Broughton at lunch. It was a business trip that I remember because I met some leaders in the Adsorption area (Vermeulen and Klein from University of California (UC) Berkeley, Wankat from Purdue, etc.). In 1984, an opportunity arose for funding to work on PAREX and ISOMAR processes when Veiga Sim~ao was Minister of Industry and Energy (MIE). He launched some Contracts for Industrial Development (CDIs) and I took the initiative of encouraging several engineers from Petrogal to join that initiative. The funding was supposed to be equivalent to 100,000 euro, but when the MIE came to Porto for the signing ceremony it seems he decided not to sign that CDI. I just found those documents while cleaning my office.

publication date

  • 2015