As the debate over new infrastructure legislation heats up in Washington D.C., we thought it might be a good time to repost an article Ribbons Across the Land originally published in our Dixon Boss magazine in the spring of 2006. We hope you enjoy re-visiting the feature.
Dixon loading arms are used to aid in the transfer of liquids and dry bulk materials. You will see loading arms at railcar and tank truck terminals, refineries and chemical plants, and food and beverage plants. They are even used to assist in the filling of drums and totes. In applications like these, loading arms can be a preferred transfer option to a standard hose assembly.
When it’s critically important to keep a gas or liquid inside a system, consider a bellows seal valve. Bellows seal valves incorporate a cylindrical metal tube that expands and contracts like an accordion to create a hermetically sealed closure in a valve stem. The bellows gets compressed when the valve is in the open position and expands when the valve is closed. Because the bellows expands and contracts as the valve is operated, and because it is welded to the stem and bonnet, there is no leak path for the gas or liquid to escape.
In its simplest terms, a filtration system isolates one substance from another. They can be as rudimentary as a strainer used to filter pasta from boiling water or as complex as a metropolitan water treatment plant. However a filter is used, it’s important that you use the right type of filter for the job; otherwise, mishaps will occur. (You wouldn’t use a colander with wide holes to drain a small pasta like orzo, would you?)
Is history repeating itself? Just as the horse was slowly replaced by the automobile, is the gasoline automobile slowly being replaced by the electric vehicle? Whether the electric vehicle will ever directly replace the gasoline automobile or not is debatable, but along with renewable fuels, electric vehicles will undoubtedly dilute the demand for gasoline over time as fewer and fewer gasoline-fueled automobiles are on the road.
At the turn of the 20th century, there were just over 8,000 automobiles in the United States. By 1910 that number had grown to nearly 500,000. Today there are over 285 million motor vehicles on the road.
The transition from the horse-drawn carriage to the automobile is an amazing story that didn’t just happen overnight. By many accounts, it took over fifty years for Americans to replace their trusted horses with the new and unfamiliar technology. Horses had been mankind’s dependable transportation for thousands of years, and many Americans believed that automobiles were unsafe.
If your business can’t afford to compromise on cleanliness, you’ve likely heard about CIP, otherwise known as Clean-In-Place. Clean-In-Place is a specialized method of sanitizing a manufacturing system’s interior contact surfaces—its valves, pipes, fittings, and tanks—without disassembling equipment.
CIP methods are employed in a variety of industries, from pharmaceuticals to food and beverage to paint and chemicals to personal care products—or in any production environment that demands sanitary conditions.
The chlor-alkali industry is broken down into three distinct business types. Each has its own set of data, including incident reports and market tracking.
It’s not an overstatement to say that 2020 has been a year like no other. The Covid-19 pandemic brought challenges like we’ve never seen before and could not have imagined. The pandemic disrupted our businesses, our schools, and affected nearly every aspect of our lives.
Performance plastics are made from petrochemicals, which is a broad term for chemicals made from petroleum, fossil fuels, or sometimes renewable sources like corn or sugarcane. PVC plastic—or polyvinyl, number four on our list of chlor-alkali chemicals—is a petrochemical performance plastic.