“Fluid flow is the forgotten science in the chemical industry,”
says Todd Willman, director of development and engineering with
engineering software company EPCON International, Houston,
Texas. By not understanding what is going on in a plant’s piping
systems, engineers are in danger of “forgetting half the
possibility of where you can make your process better,” he
warns. As Willman has highlighted before, the benefits of using
pipeline simulation tools at the piping and instrumentation
diagram (P&ID) level, rather than running simulations just on
the process flow diagram, can often be overlooked. The problem,
he says, is that chemical engineers “typically have
significantly less ‘schooling’ in fluid mechanics principles”
than their mechanical engineering counterparts, who tend to take
charge of fluid flow analyses in other industries. Leigh
Gillard, Asia channels manager with Flowmaster International,
Towcester, U.K. and Skokie, Ill., makes a similar point.
Speaking of an application of his company’s pipe mo