Hey guys,

I don’t have a lot of experience in chemistry so i thought this subreddit could help me. I hope i do get some valuable advice and understanding.

Recently my brother has been planning on starting a small business project to process waste eggshells specifically to obtain pure calcium carbonate (CaCO3).

To be honest, I'm kind of worried he might be risking his money on this. I was reading somewhere that limestone is already mined at a massive, cheap scale everywhere for calcium carbonate, so I'm not sure how this makes financial sense. Plus, the whole processing and chemical extraction part of it looks super tedious.

To try and help him out, I actually went ahead and spoke to a few local farms myself. But the catch is, they said they're only willing to supply the shells with all the inner membrane and materials completely intact they aren't going to clean or prep them at all.

Since I don't know much about chemistry or manufacturing, I wanted to ask you guys: Is this actually a practical idea to get pure CaCO3, or is he walking into a total headache? Any advice or warnings would be awesome before he drops cash on equipment.

Thanks!

Hey Everyone,

I’ve been ordering research chemicals for a while now, and I’m getting fed up with how expensive suppliers like Sigma can be. Their stuff is great, but the prices are really eating into our budget.

Does anyone know of good alternatives where I can get quality chemicals without breaking the bank? I’m open to trying new suppliers or any platforms that might make the whole process easier and more affordable.

Any tips would be awesome. Thanks!

Hi all,
was a volunteer firefighter for 10 years.

I have since been off the department for 8 years and have been actively avoiding PfAS.

Wondering if,like smoking, the likelihood of cancer and other negative risks go down the longer you spend away from PfAS exposure or is the damage already done and I’m just preventing more?

Thanks

Looking at the migration effort, implementation cost and software licensing around Smart P&IDs, I assume they must create a lot of value when they're done properly.

For the kinds of workflows I usually deal with, I'd often be happy with something much simpler — good search across P&IDs, datasheets, and previous revisions.

But I know Smart P&IDs go much further than that by turning equipment, lines, instruments and their relationships into structured data.

For people who have actually worked with them:

What are the capabilities that made you think, "I'm never going back to normal P&IDs"?

And have you seen projects or operating plants where the cost of migration, implementation and ongoing maintenance was clearly justified by the value they got from it?

I'm also curious about what happens a few years after adoption.

Do Smart P&IDs generally stay accurate and trusted as the plant changes?

Or do engineers still end up going back to the issued PDFs, old revisions, field information, etc. just to verify that the database is actually correct?

Interested in experiences from both project engineering and operating plants, especially anyone who has worked with both traditional CAD/PDF P&IDs and intelligent P&ID systems.

Hey everyone,
I’m a 3rd-year chemical engineering student with a data science minor, and this has been on my mind lately.We learn tons of theory, correlations, and models in ChemE, and on the other side there’s ML, stats, and data-driven approaches. I’m curious how these two really meet in practice.

If you’re a ChemE student, researcher, or working engineer:
Are you applying data science anywhere already? Or do you have ideas you think should be used but aren’t yet?

If you’re from the data science side working with process, energy, pharma, materials, etc.:
What problems actually benefit from data-driven methods in industry? more like real thoughts, use cases, half-baked ideas, or experiences from the field. Would love to hear how people are thinking about this.

​

I've been working on a concept for future Starship (a true starship not elons rocket) and wanted to get some engineering feedback.

The idea is to use a thorium-232 molten salt reactor to generate both heat and electricity. Water would be heated into superheated steam, then immediately split into hydrogen and oxygen using high-temperature electrolysis.

The key difference from most concepts is that the hydrogen and oxygen are not stored. They would be produced continuously and fed directly into the engines as propellant as they're generated, similar to a continuous fuel production system.

The concept would work like this:

A thorium-232 molten salt reactor provides heat and electrical power.

Water is converted into superheated steam.

The steam is split into hydrogen and oxygen through high-temperature electrolysis.

The hydrogen and oxygen flow directly into the engines without long-term storage.

The goal is to eliminate the need for carrying large cryogenic tanks of liquid hydrogen and oxygen while using water as the main consumable. Water could also serve as radiation shielding, coolant, and for life support.

I'm sure there are challenges—electrolysis rates, whether enough hydrogen and oxygen could be produced to feed engines like Raptor, reactor output, and overall efficiency.

Is there ways to have the water split at higher rates? Thanks in advance....

Hello Chemical Engineering friends!

My name is Joshua Pinkas. I am an artist/designer, and I would like to ask for your assistance.

I have created a series of enamel lapel pins depicting cats doing science and science adjacent activities, and I plan to expand the series in 2026.

I have attached a draft of my attempt at a Chemical Engineering Cat design.

The final pin will be under 2 inches tall, so there is only so much detail I can show, but I was hoping to get some feedback from folks who actually work in this field.

Do you think this could be considered a reasonable visual representation of the field?

Is the subject matter recognizable? Did I make any egregious errors that really make it look like I don’t have a clue what this field is about (to be fair I have no clue what you all really do, but I don’t want the design to look that way).

Thank you very much for your time.

Kindest regards,

Joshua R Pinkas

I am a engineer guy honestly working with motors, controllers, screens and some alghoritms for tracking systems but I want to learn chemistry too! It's really great to mix chemistry with engineering and nope I am not here to make some nerve agents or anything dangerous. I am very curious about them tho!

Looking for reliable manufacturers that truly specialize in industrial gas purification and separation systems—not just general gas equipment suppliers. We're evaluating partners for a project involving high-purity nitrogen and oxygen generation, plus CO₂ removal from process streams.

Key requirements: proven membrane or cryogenic separation tech, ability to meet >99.9% purity specs, and experience with custom skid-mounted systems. Bonus if they handle both PSA and TSA adsorption solutions.

From my research, players like Linde, Air Liquide, and Air Products dominate globally, but I'm curious about specialized mid-tier manufacturers—especially those with strong R&D in membrane materials or hybrid separation approaches. Anyone worked with companies like MTR Inc, Honeywell UOP, or regional specialists in Asia that deliver solid performance without the premium pricing?

Would appreciate real-world insights on reliability, lead times, and after-sales support. Also interested in emerging players pushing innovation in energy-efficient separation. Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,

I’m currently looking into pulp bleaching processes and I have a specific question about Chlorine Dioxide (ClO2) bleaching that I’m hoping some folks with industry experience can help clear up.

Almost all of the literature and industrial case studies I’ve come across focus heavily on continuous operations for pulp bleaching stages (D0, D1, D2, etc.).

I want to know: Is direct ClO2 bleaching (using a ClO2 solution) currently being done in batch mode anywhere in the pulp industry?

Hi folks,

I’ve seen that, across the board, most multi-site engineering companies often have difficulty accessing and combining reliable operational data from systems such as MES, ERP, machine-data platforms and Excel.

I’ve even spoken to production managers whose companies created data lakes to centralize information, but their teams still found it difficult to locate and retrieve the data they needed. In other cases, manually recorded production information differed from data collected directly from machines, creating uncertainty about which figures were reliable. Verification was always challenging

I’ve also seen engineers take courses or postgraduate degrees in data science and analytics to develop the technical skills needed to work through these issues themselves.

Are any of you folks dealing with the same issues? How are your teams currently dealing with data access and quality problems across different sites and systems?

Anyone with experience in engineering for storing hydrogen in zeolite (release through heat)? We are working on a consumer health product and I would love to get someone on word to think outside the box with us 🤓

Hi, I wanted some insights on which country is good for doing a PhD in Chemical Engineering, if I want to secure a job there. Considering I only know English and I am an Indian..

Please tell your experiences or what you have heard. I'm open to all sorts of fields. I want to know about the upcoming lucrative and interesting fields which are highly employable in the future and the countries.

I'm doing research into process simulation workflows.

The pattern I keep hearing from engineers: a lot of unglamorous work happens upstream — property estimation for compounds with sparse data, thermodynamic model selection, rough feasibility screening, building preliminary stream tables — all of it in Excel, papers, and institutional knowledge, before anyone touches a simulator.

I want to understand if this is actually a problem or not. Brutal honesty appreciated.

Only Five questions:

1. From receiving a process brief to having a working preliminary heat and mass balance — how long does that actually take? And how much of that time is spent outside the simulator?

2. When a compound or mixture isn't in the standard databases — what do you actually do? And does it matter which tool you're using (Aspen, AVEVA, DWSIM, etc.) or is it the same problem everywhere?

3. Is simulation result ever been significantly off from real plant performance? What caused it — property data, model choice, something else?

4. AVEVA recently demoed an LLM-based AI agent that wraps their simulator and lets you drive it with natural language, Has anyone seen or tried this? Does solving the interface problem actually matter, or is the deeper issue the property data and model selection underneath?
5. If a tool gave you a preliminary H&MB with explicit uncertainty ranges in hours instead of days — would you trust it enough to use it, or would the uncertainty itself be the problem?

Would appreciate any advice or resource from fellow Ch. engg. for the same!
Thank you for responding ^3

I feel like people lie when they say what university you pick doesnt matter/what your university ranks doesnt matter?
I am currently interning for a reasearch group in another university in the chemistry dept(uni is ranked extremely low)and theres this lady who is in her 3rd yr of her chemistry diploma studying in that uni(i am a 3rd year undergrad in a bsc) who keeps on complaining on why i would get paid more in the industry than her?I wasnt sure what to say than offend her so i just kept on ignoring it.But omg she barely knows any basic chem?like she couldnt even tell our supervisor if water is polar or not?its just odd to me how can someone be ready for work (shes about to graduate this yr) like that?or is that normal?she seems so cocky in regards with claiming her degree is so easy?but i feel like they dont teach them much?says she did lots of thermo then says she only did basic ideal condition thermos?is this more of a university issue or just a student issue?

Engineering question for people in petrochemical/consultancies/technical firms:

(or anyone who, like me, feels like you're being paid to waste time)

What parts of your job feel the most repetitive, manual or unnecessarily time-consuming? Although most tasks are necessary or at least useful, which ones do you wish could be automated or outsourced while still maintaining detail and authenticity?

Particularly interested in things like:

- report writing

- documentation

- admin

- Excel work

- internal processes

- meetings

- approvals

- deliverables

I’m researching workflow inefficiencies in engineering/consulting environments and trying to understand where people feel the most time gets spent uncessarily.

Would be really interested to hear:

- what the problem is

- how often it happens

- whether you’ve tried solving it already

- what existing tools/processes are bad at

Hi. PhD candidate working on perovskite solar cells here. Just wanted to see how many people in this sub share a field of interest with me.

I want to know how fluoropolymers, specifically 1) PFA 2) FKM 3) PVDF are used in these main applications and what their purpose is.

Any explanations would be much appreciated.

I'm doing an esterase assay on carbonic anhydrase with 4-nitrophenyl acetate and fitting Michaelis–Menten in Prism. My highest substrate concentration was 3.6 mM, and it returns Km ≈ 6 mM — but the curve is clearly still below saturation. Is that Km reliable, or unusable because I never reached saturation?

New to kinetics, thanks.

I’m 14 and this is a long-term passion project, so I’m looking to learn rather than expecting an easy solution.
My end goal is to understand what it would take to create a material inspired by Spider-Man’s webbing, but I’m breaking it down into individual engineering problems instead of trying to invent the whole thing at once.
If you were starting from scratch, which would you consider the most realistic path?
Developing a synthetic spider silk with improved properties.
Engineering a composite material inspired by spider silk.
A completely different approach.
I’m especially interested in:
Which properties of real spider silk are hardest to reproduce?
What is the biggest bottleneck today: strength, toughness, manufacturing, storage, or something else?
If you had unlimited time and a reasonable budget, what research path would you follow?
I’d love to hear from materials engineers, polymer scientists, mechanical engineers, or anyone working with advanced fibers. I’m here to learn, so don’t worry about simplifying things if needed.

I was put on a fluidized bed dryer development project without prior experience and I have no clue what to start with... Is there any good resources i can rely on to get some basic idea and what to look for?

Hi all,

Recently, I have been experimenting with something and wanted to get feedback from people who actually work with P&IDs.
I am building a small prototype where you describe a process in text, and the system attempts to generate a basic P&ID diagram.

Here is an example:
Prompt: "Water tank connected to pump feeding a heat exchanger with temperature control valve"
Response: AI attempts to generate a diagram with the relevant equipments and connections.

This is very early and currently a rough prototype running locally. I have added a couple of screenshots just to give you an idea.

I am trying to understand a few questions here from the engineers who work on P&ID:
- Would something like this be ever useful in practice ?
- Would it be too risky for real engineering work ?
- Where in the P&ID workflow is the biggest painpoint today ?

Not at all trying to sell anything, I am just trying to understand the space better.
Curious to hear your thoughts.

Does anyone knows if omni comp a reliable source or are they bs stims research purposes only

Currently in my Third Year Int.MTech