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Student project presented in Marl
A group of students from the Technical University
Dortmund has created plans for a production
plant for highly pure 1-butene at
Marl Chemical Park. The students received
support for their project assignment from
Evonik’s Advanced Intermediates Business
Unit’s Innovation Management.
Students taking the course in bio and
chemical engineering at the TU Dortmund
are required to take part in a group project
assignment to conceptualize a specialty chemicals
plant. They have only six weeks to complete
their assignment, which entails composing
the process-related design and defining
the dimensions of a facility, with its columns,
reactors, receptacles, heat exchangers, pumps,
and compressors, as well as devising layouts,
optimizing energy utilization at their facility,
and doing the cost and economic-feasibility
accounting.
It has become something of a tradition for
the Innovation Management team at the
elements39 Issue 2|2012
Jason Chan (second
from left), head of the
raffinate facility,
detailed Performance
Intermediate’s integrated
C4 operations
Advanced Intermediates Business Unit to put
forward its proposal for the project to the
university’s Technical Chemistry Chair, Prof.
Arno Behr. This involvement adds to the practical
character of the assignment, while it also
serves as a proverbial bridge between academia
and industry. What’s more, the collaboration
allows the students to subsequently
make the comparison between their finished
theoretical concept, as devised on the
basis of information available to them from
literary sources, with actual facilities operating
in practice at Marl Chemical Park.
In 2011 the Innovation Management
team’s project proposal was for the conceptualization
of a facility for the manufacture of
highly pure 1-butene. The Performance Intermediates
Business Line runs an integrated C4
facility at the Marl site. Aside from butadienes,
MTBE, isononanol, and diisononyl
phthalate (DINP), a plasticizer, this, the only
plant of its kind anywhere in the world, also
More than 400 offshore pipes with veStAMID® nrG
VESTAMID® NRG 1001, a high-performance
polymer, can already be found in a total of
over 800 kilometers of pipeline. The polyamide
12 made by Evonik Industries has gone
into the making of more than 400 unbonded
flexible pipes to service the oil production
industry. Oil companies have been using
these pipes in their offshore projects for
years now.
What has made the polyamide 12 molding
compound so popular are its superior properties
over those of other polyamides used as
barrier layers in flexible pipes. Together with
Wellstream International Limited, Evonik
conducted intensive testing to demonstrate
compliance with the international norms API
17J for flexible risers and ISO 13628-2. The
tests praised the creep performance, ductility,
thermal expansion, methanol compatibility,
and hydrolysis resistance.
The molding compound has since been used
commercially for the manufacture of flexible
pipes. Specially developed VESTAMID® NRG
combines its technical advantages with
extraordinarily consistent product quality,
which ensures outstanding processability and
thus reduces setup times, scrap, and the risk
of extrusion faults.
For decades now, Evonik has been a
leader in the development and marketing of
high-grade polyamide compounds for line
systems in motor vehicles. This high degree
of expertise in the development of extrusion
compounds has now been carried over to
molding compounds for the thick-walled piping
systems which, thanks to their advantages
over existing systems, are increasingly
coming into use in the oil and gas industries.
Flexible: Offshore pipes
with veStAMID® nrG
makes 1-butene. 1-butene is a key comonomer
used predominantly to make high-grade
polyethylene and poly-1-butene.
The students executed their group assignment
in the 2011/2012 winter semester. They
then visited Marl Chemical Park for a guided
tour by Jason Chan, head of the raffinate facility,
who detailed the integrated C4 operations
to them. This group of aspiring young
academics proved to be particularly fascinated
by the two 80- meter-high columns at the
heart of 1-butene production.
The group was then invited to present its
own concept to an audience comprising staff
members from the business unit’s Production,
Engineering, and Research teams and from
Process Technology and Engineering. The
students impressed this audience with the
sound quality of their completed work. The
discussion which followed addressed the differences
apparent between the students’ concept
and a real facility and also brought forth
a number of tips concerning practical considerations.
The participants all agreed that educational
elements of this kind on the student
curriculum help to make studies more practice-oriented
as well as providing a platform
for contact between industry and students.
Thus, the scheme sees the Innovation Manage
ment unit making a valuable contribution
to Evonik’s em ployer branding endeavors.