MANHATTAN PROJECTS

The food court at the Jacob K Javits Centre on Manhattan's Lower West Side is not the best place in New York for Chinese food. But hang around the limp noodles, fluorescent sweet-and-sour and sagging aubergines during the biennial Chemical Process Industries Exposition, or ChemShow to give its more usual name, and you'll quickly feel the pulse of the process industries on the other side of the Atlantic.

That pulse is showing signs of quickening, with much talk of new orders, solid leads and real interest in new services over the chopsticks and prawn crackers. The 900 exhibitors faced packed aisles for much of the three-day show, with areas devoted to control and instrumentation and powder processing proving particularly busy. Almost 200 companies were exhibiting at the show for the first time, said show manager Clay Stevens. `Maybe more companies are realising that the show is a good promotional vehicle,' he speculated. `For example, there are 30 companies returning that have not exhibited since 1993, and two who haven't been here since 1971.'

In the opening address for the exhibition, CK Witco chief executive Vincent Calarco commented that the industry must face the 21st century by trying to see past the increasing globalisation of commerce: thinking small, rather than thinking big. This might seem un-American - and certainly runs counter to Calarco's own CV, as he is also chairman and president of his company as well as holding the presidency of the Society of Chemical Industry - but Calarco insisted that `the challenge is to be big enough to think small.'

`CK Witco is certainly not uninterested in size,' commented Calarco. `But we still want to maintain a specialty chemical, small business mentality. In fact, in many ways we view our company as the sum of numerous small businesses.' Companies that don't think along these lines are likely to focus on the `big picture' but lose sight of their various operating businesses - which are in fact the source of their profits, he stressed.

This isn't a simple matter, Calarco said. In spiritual mood, he called it `a very fine balancing act. because it is the yin and the yang, the push and pull between small and big. How do we make a corporate vision big enough to encompass a worldwide business empire while making it specific enough to reinforce a small business mindset?' Part of the answer is to make sure that everyone in the organisation knows what is expected of them and understands how his or her role contributes to the whole, he said. `It reminds me of a quotation I read some time ago: "If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else." `

One notable contrast with UK-based shows, which tend to be targeted to a specific industrial audience, was the variety of visitors. `We like coming to the ChemShow because you always get such a good spread of visitors,' commented Harold Nicol of Dow Chemical's specialty alkanolamines business. `People come from every process sector we can think of, and always a few that we hadn't, to swap ideas with other sectors. You always get a good cross-fertilisation.'

Krishna Gupta of filtration specialist Porous Materials agreed. `We usually go to the filtration show, but we decided to come here as well because you get such a good turnout from a variety of people in various industries.' Some exhibitors were surprised by this: `We have been busier than usual, which is inexplicable considering the state of the industry,' said Slobodan Jancic of Sulzer Chemtech. `We have had more people looking for products and services then in previous years, and most of the people know exactly what they're looking for.'

The exhibitors included multinationals familiar to Process Engineering readers. Fisher-Rosemount was promoting its PlantWeb system, including the new 8742C magnetic flowmeter transmitter which has just been awarded Foundation Fieldbus certification. Foxboro continued to roll out its I/A series Batch Suite control system to cover food, drugs and speciality chemical plants, and also announced a new service, LifeTime Performance Services, which will `allow customers to obtain measurable benefits from their automation investment.' It also used the show to announce a multimillion dollar order from Indian refiner Reliance, to implement the world's first closed-loop blending system at its Jamnagar facility, the world's largest refinery and aromatics complex.

Most of the companies were unfamiliar, however, and many showed the innovation central to the process industries. MSO Corporation, based in Pennsylvania, was showing a waste disposal technology which works by oxidising waste in molten salt furnaces. These, marketing chief Frank Termine explained, generally use sodium carbonate and operate at 150 degrees -1300 degrees C. Especially suited to organic wastes, they achieve in excess of 99.99 per cent destruction of waste and produce no dioxins or furans. The salt bath captures soot and char, and acts as an inbuilt scrubber for acid gases, so no post-treatment of off-gases is needed. Moreover, they can be used to recover valuable metals such as silver, gold and nickel from organic wastes. The gases produced by the oxidised waste are mostly CO2 and water, so the units can be used to feed a shift reactor to generate synthsis gas.

More innovative solutions were on offer at heat transfer specialist HTRI. Currently concentrating on software to optimise heat exchanger installations, the company has just released a new version of its engineering programme, ACE, which designs three-dimensional air-cooled heat exchanger/economiser bundles. Incorporating routines to calculate heat transfer of both the air side and the tube side of the exchangers, the programme specifies the number of rows of tubes in a bundle, their width, and the number of passes needed for a given set of operating conditions.

HTRI is shortly to bring its expertise to the UK, with a new office opening this month at the Surrey Research Park in Guildford. With UK customers ranging from equipment suppliers Balke-Duerr, contractors Brown & Root and Foster Wheeler, and operators including BP Amoco, DuPont, and Mobil, the company is setting up the office to cope with the expansion of its business.

Overall, there was an optimism at the show that seems lacking in British and even European industry. As Calarco put it: `The complex changes we've faced in our industry will remain with us: competitive globalisation will increase; technology will continue to accelerate the pace of business; consolidation of chemical producers will not cease; our interdependence will grow as we focus on our chosen businesses; environmental demands will not abate. We'll be challenged like never before. But companies with managements and people able to synthesise these issues into business opportunities will succeed.'