Experimental methods in chemical engineering: Pressure

Pressure and temperature are the most important state variables for monitoring physicochemical processes to detect deviations that might lead to explosions and to verify levels, flow rate, and solids/gas hold-up. Pressure fluctuations in multi-phase systems identify regime changes and flow anomalies. Pressure signals are the first indicator of a process upset and are tied into distributed control systems (DCS) to sound alarms when they drift to high or low and activate safety interlocks in the case of high, high-high, low, and low-low conditions. To maximize the information, it requires that pressure gauges (transducers) are installed and calibrated precisely. Pressure measuring devices include manometers, aneroid devices like bellows and Bourdon gauges, and electronic instruments—piezoresistive, piezoelectric, and capacitive. The electronic elements have the advantage of higher precision and faster response times to measure fluctuations. The Bourdon gauges are standard equipment for pressure regulators and are mounted on the exterior of vessels and pipes to facilitate visual inspections. Over 2 million articles indexed by the Web of Science Core collection mention pressure, and in 2021, chemical engineering ranks had over 7000 articles—only multidisciplinary material sciences and energy and fuels had more. A bibliometric analysis identified five research clusters: temperature, combustion, and kinetics; separation, membranes, and energy efficiency; carbon dioxide (capture and storage), water, and thermodynamics; methane, adsorption, and transport phenomena (e.g., diffusion and permeability); and modelling, optimization, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD).