BOOK REVIEWS

Rules of Thumb for Chemical EngineersC. BrannanGulf Publishing Company, 1998414 pp, £64/$79, ISBN 0 88415 788 1

Reviewed by Alan Hall (Zeneca, UK)

Carl Brannan’ s book provides a huge amount of valuableinformation on a wide variety of chemical engineeringapplications from sizing pipelines to economic evaluationof process options. It includes a section on start-up withsuch practical tips as suggested initial controller settings anda detailed inventory of useful equipment, includinga ladder!

In many ways it is an old-fashioned almost classicalprocess engineering book with lots of nomographs forestimating system properties and graphs with multiple linesrepresenting correlations at different values of a particularparameter. That is not to say that the book concerns itselfonly with empirical data, the relevant engineering scienceis also covered in the more detailed sections. The bookcontains 25 wide-ranging chapters, but the ® rst three, on¯ uid ¯ ow, heat exchangers and fractionation amount to aquarter of its total content. These three sections containsome tremendously useful and detailed information on thedesign of plant in these applications. In ¯ uid ¯ ow we aregiven typical economic operating velocities in pipes fora variety of situations. In heat transfer there are pages ofoverall heat transfer coef® cients for different duties andinstallations. For the busy process engineer trying to obtainapproximate equipment sizes for early evaluation of processoptions these data can be invaluable. Further down thedesign path, there is more detailed advice on control systemsfor e.g. air-cooled heat exchangers and recommendedcon® gurations for different reboiler types on distillationcolumns. A comprehensive review of packing types andcolumn internals is also provided in an easy-to-read format.There are also useful mass transfer data on absorption ofhydrocarbons and common inorganic gases. The section onproperties includes a nomograph for liquid viscosity, whichmany chemical engineers will recognise as well as extensivedata on auto-ignition temperature and Gibbs free energy offormation for many organic compounds.

The shorter sections of the book were perhaps lessimpressive. The chapter on blending contained very littlein the way of useful data on agitator design and selection.This is perhaps related to the author’ s background. He spent40 years in the chemical industry but predominantly in oiland natural gas in the USA. It is not surprising thereforethat the book has a strong element of continuous processingwith petrochemicals and uses US units. This is alsore¯ ected in the coverage of solids handling, which meritsonly a very short chapter on pneumatic conveying. Equallythere is little mention of batch processing. However, theshorter sections in common with the rest of the book containplenty of references for further reading, although it has tobe said that few of them are recent.

So who would ® nd this book useful? At £64 I think it is

probably a little expensive for most students although theymight ® nd it a helpful reference when working on a designproject. A practising chemical engineer, particularly arelatively recent graduate in the petrochemical industrywould probably be able to apply much of the content, fromthe early stages of a project for approximate sizing andevaluation of options through to detailed design. Theinformation is well ordered and easy to ® nd making it avaluable book to have on your shelf. For engineers inareas other than hydrocarbon processing, while there areundoubtedly some gems of wisdom in heat exchange,column design and utilities, its application would be a littlemore limited. For those of us more used to working inmetric units the use of US units throughout might also beconsidered as something of a drawback.

Modeling Vapor-Liquid EquilibriaÐ Cubic Equationsof State and Their Mixing RulesH. Orbey and S. SandlerCambridge University Press, 1998204 pp, £50/$80, ISBN 0 521 62027 9

Reviewed by Eric W. Lemmon (National Institute ofStandards and Technology)

Orbey and Sandler have presented an excellent summaryand evaluation of recent models for calculating vapor-liquidequilibria of ¯ uids and ¯ uid mixtures of interest to engineersin practice. Professor Sandler is appropriately recognizedas an authority on the application and improvement ofpractical mixing rules for industrial applications. Bothauthors have considerable experience in the study ofmixture properties, particularly those which exhibit a highdegree of nonideality.

A critical review of activity coef® cient models is givenby the authors, and the Wilson, NRTL (nonrandom, two-liquid), van Laar, UNIQUAC, and UNIFAC models aredescribed and compared. The combination of two-parameter cubic equations of state with the classical vander Waals mixing rules includes the analysis of typicalmodels with single binary interaction parameter mixingrules and recent models having mixing rules with two ormore parameters. The capabilities and limitations of thesemixing rules and their recent modi® cations are summarized,and the de® ciencies in the single-parameter model forapplication to nonideal systems such as mixtures of analkane and an alcohol are cited. For nonideal systems, thetwo parameter model is shown to provide advantagesover the activity coef® cient models. The major strength ofthis book is the concentration on VLE models using cubicequations of state with recently developed mixing rules thatcombine equation of state models with excess free-energymodels. The approach is similar to the use of mixing rulesfor cubic equations of state, except that the parameters inthe mixing rules are also functions of the excess Helmholtzor Gibbs free energy. Since the free energy is modelled as

Trans IChemE, Vol 77, Part A, March 1999

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