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Removal of CO2 had been one of the main issues facing in worldwide. Intensive researches are still going on to effectively reduce CO2 at low cost. Physical absorption is one of the well-established technologies used to removal CO2 from other gases. The physical absorption process is simple; whereby it contains only one gas liquid contactor and a series of flash tank to regenerate solvent. The CO2 will be absorbed in the physical solvent in the high pressure gas liquid contactor and flashed out in the medium and low pressure flash tank. The advantage of using physical solvent is that the CO2 is absorbed without any chemical reaction involved, thus it can be flashed out easily by reducing the pressure, passing inert gas through the solvent and mild thermal regeneration. The physical absorption is the best operated at high pressure and low temperature as the solubility of CO2 in the solvent is high at the particular condition. Researches carried out currently are focusing on solvent development, absorption and desorption process development and mathematical modeling.

BACKGROUND Limited work has been available to model thickness and temperature dependent physical aging encountered in polymeric membranes for gas separation to provide physically intuitive interpretation underlying the process. The Tait equation of states has been integrated within conventional dual mode mathematical model to characterize the physical aging mechanism, whereby the model requires merely temperature dependent parameters. Subsequently, the Tait‐dual mode mechanism model has been incorporated within a succession of states methodology that quantifies transport mechanism in a countercurrent hollow fiber membrane. Finally, the developed mathematical model has been implemented in Aspen HYSYS to constitute an oxygen enrichment plant. RESULTS The simulation model has been validated with experimental observation with an acceptable error of < 6.5%. The process simulation tool has been used to evaluate the separation performance of oxygen enrichment plant using polymeric membrane with consideration of operating temperature (35–55 °C) and thickness dependent (400–1000 nm) physical aging. It is found that the optimal membrane design that generates highest profitability with physical aging consideration is at film thickness of ∼400 nm and operating temperature of 55 °C. Under such operating condition, the deviation between ideal and non‐ideal simulation model is also the smallest at ∼6%, which implies that physical aging has the least impact to the operability of the plant. CONCLUSION The developed simulation model has the potential to be applied for complex membrane system design (multiple membranes or hybrid system), scale up and optimization study that is essentially required for industrial scale application. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry

Chemically modified vegetable oils have become commercially attractive nowadays because they can be utilized as specialized components for the production of bioplasticizers and biopolymers due to their characteristics as being inexpensive, nontoxic, biodegradable, and renewable products. Due to the presence of unsaturation sites in the vegetable oils, they can be chemically modified and transformed into polymeric monomers such as acrylated epoxidized vegetable oils through well-known processes like epoxidation and acrylation processes. Acrylated epoxidized vegetable oil is a biopolymer that has a multitude of applications and is used mainly as a coating material for plastic, paper, and wood. There is an enormous demand for this biopolymer, and the market growth prospects are huge in some regions of the world. However, there are some challenges in the synthesis of acrylated epoxidized vegetable oils in achieving the performance of similar acrylated polymer derived from petroleum sources. In this paper, the chemical structure, properties, and chemical modifications of different types of vegetable oils were reviewed where the emphasis was given on epoxidation and its subsequent acrylation processes. This paper also highlights four types of epoxidation and their subsequent acrylation processes involving five different vegetable oils.

α-Sulfo fatty methyl ester sulfonate (α-MES) is one of the anionic surfactants that is currently used commercially in the cleaning industry. Although the fundamental studies on α-MES were initiated as far back as the 1950s, it was only recognized as a class of surfactant in the 1980s. In the initial stage of development, α-MES has been associated with many technical impediments, which created a fear factor for the detergent industry to consider this oleobased anionic surfactant for commercial production. However, all the technical adversities have been resolved after five decades of continuous active research and development activities. This paper will review the history, chemistry, process development, processing technologies, performance, commercial production, and applications of oleobased based α-MES with special emphasis on palm oilbased α-MES. The paper also will highlight the challenges and adversities faced by the technology developers and product formulators toward the commercialization of α-MES as an active ingredient in the production of powder and liquid laundry detergents.

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Thousands of oil spill incidents regrettably have occurred on a daily basis around the globe. Oil spills are a form of pollution that poses major catastrophic threats to marine ecosystems. Oil spill incidents commonly occur in the middle of the ocean, and the process to remove the oil becomes a great challenge. Absorbents, due to their good oil-absorbing characteristics, are becoming more popular nowadays as one of the effective oil spill clean-up methods. Among the many types of oil absorbents, plant fibers were also being studied to remove the oil spills from the sea surface. This paper reviews factors leading to oil spills, the detrimental effect of the oil spill on the environment, the oil spill removal methods, and the application of plant fibers as oil absorbent material. The paper also will highlight the latest development on the utilization of kenaf core fibers as oil-absorbent material and the use of oil absorbed kenaf core fibers as fuel briquette by taking advantage the high calorific value of the oil spill.

For a gas-liquid separator sizing, many engineers have neglected the flow pattern of incoming fluids. The impact of inlet slug flow which impeded onto the separator’s liquid phase will cause a separator fails to perform when sloshing happened in the separator. To date, the study on verifying the impact of inlet slug flow in a separator remains limited. In this paper, the impact of inlet momentum and inlet slug flow on the hydrodynamics in a separator for cases without an inlet device were investigated. The experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results of cavity formation and sloshing occurrence in the separator in this study were compared. A User Defined Function (UDF) was used to describe the inlet slug flow at the separator inlet. Inlet slug flow occurred at inlet momentum from 200 to 1000 Pa, and sloshing occurred in the separator at 1000 Pa. Both experimental and simulated results showed similar phenomena.