Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
edited by
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
The Pilot Plant Real Book: A Unique Handbook for the Chemical Process Industry by Francis X. McConville FXM Engineering and Design, Worchester, MA 2002. 313 pp. ISBN 0972176918 (spiral bound) $89.95 reviewed by Mike Wilson
In the early months of my first job in industry, the research director sent me out to Building 10 in the manufacturing plant. “See if you can help them out. It’s a real mess” he said. Only a few minutes in Building 10 was needed to prove that I was not prepared for this at all. If I had had a copy of this book at hand, I might have made a contribution to solving the problems. Alas, no deal! I venture that the “Real” in the unusual name for this book comes from “get real”, a phrase that I heard not a few times in my early adventures in the plant and pilot plant environment. This book is intended to help people who scale-up chemical processes and does what The Chemist’s Companion (1) did for the lab chemists. The book is divided into eleven sections, each section taking up topics that engineers and chemists need to handle in the plant. The first section enumerates the key factors that have to be planned for in preparing for scale-up work. Much good advice for the bench chemist is found here, as differences between lab and pilot plant are emphasized. This is essential study for the budding process chemist and chemical engineer, as each can learn where the perspective of the other. The succeeding ten sections take up specific topics such as solvents, heat transfer, and gases, just to name a few. These
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sections contain tables of relevant data; there are more than 200 of these, often supplemented with well-developed examples of how to use them. This is a great service to scale-up planners since a large number of essential sources is consolidated here. There is also a first-rate index. The Pilot Plant Real Book is obviously intended for intensive use: it is printed on heavy paper, and the spiral-bound format allows the book to lie flat on the desk. The format is at once a strength and a weakness: the spiral binding may not take the wear and tear that this book will experience. Since errors in books can cause considerable problems, it is gratifying that a Web site (http://www.pprbook.com) is available to help keep one’s copy up-to-date. Errata are already posted there, and there is a button to report newly found errors. The site also has a few templates that can give the user a jump start for using the book as a planning tool. If these Web pages are kept current and expanded, then this book will be valuable, indeed. The The Pilot Plant Real Book will not find a place in the chemistry classroom, but every scale-up professional will want to start an on-the-job education with a copy. At the modest cost, it is hard to see why not. Literature Cited 1. Gordon, Arnold J.; Ford, Richard A. The Chemist’s Companion; John Wiley & Sons: New York, 1972.
Mike Wilson is in the Department of Chemistry, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122 and is also president of Wilson Technologies, Ltd., a firm consulting in process chemistry;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 80 No. 11 November 2003 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
