Chemical & Life Science

Basic Chemicals

The concept of basic chemicals is very similar to that of chemical commodities. Basic chemicals are chemical substances that serve as starting materials to produce a variety of other chemicals; for this reason, they are in general commodities that are highly demanded. Some examples of basic chemicals are Ethylene, Benzene, Chlorine, Sulfuric Acid, Hydrochloric Acid, Nitric Acid, Soda Ash, and Potassium Sulfate.

Our compressors, mostly dry-running vertical or horizontal machines of smaller sizes up to 190, are frequently used in the chemical industry for the recovery of high-purity hydrogen chloride. This involves the combustion of chlorine oxyhydrogen gas, a mixture of hydrogen and chlorine.

Fatty Alcohol

Fatty alcohols are aliphatic, long-chain, primary alcohols. The hydrocarbon radicals are unbranched with 6 to 22 carbon atoms and can be mono- or polyunsaturated.

Fatty alcohols are found in natural waxes, bound as carboxylic acid esters, e.g., in wool wax. Such alcohols usually contain an even number of C atoms with up to 36 or more C atoms. The higher primary alcohols with 24 to 36 carbon atoms are called wax alcohols.

As a rule, fatty alcohols are produced petrochemically from crude oil. Fatty alcohols can be obtained from olefins and carbon dioxide by hydrogenation on copper or copper/cadmium catalysts. In the chemical industry, they are produced, for example, by reducing fatty acids and used directly as nonionic surfactants or other surfactants.

Production from renewable raw materials, for example by hydrogenation of fatty acids from vegetable oils, is becoming increasingly important. In this process, the carboxy group (-COOH) typical of carboxylic acids is converted to the hydroxy group (-OH) typical of alcohols. The C atom of the -COOH group remains as -CH₂-OH. Thus, cetyl alcohol (C16) is obtained as a product of palmitic acid from palm oil or coconut oil and stearyl alcohol (C18) from stearic acid.

For the production of fatty alcohol, vertical and horizontal compressors are usually used as make-up and recycle gas machines of sizes 130 and 190, which compress hydrogen up to 300 bar, producing a perfect reaction with fatty acids.

Fertilizers

Ammonia is mainly used to produce fertilizers such as urea, ammonium nitrate, ammonium sulfate and ammonium phosphates. They contribute to the nutrition of a large part of the world's population.

In the Haber-Bosch process, a large-scale industrial chemical process, ammonia synthesis is the central process step.

The synthesis is carried out from atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen on an iron-containing catalyst at pressures of 150 to 350 bar and temperatures of 400 to 500 °C.

Depending on the requirements, different types and sizes of our compressor portfolio are used for this process, i.e. as V-, vertical or horizontal type, in lubricated or dry-running design as well as all sizes up to the largest 500.

Ammonia (NH₃)

Fertilizer containing nitrogen can be produced with the aid of ammonia synthesis. Ammonia is an important basic material in several chemical processes such as nitric acid production, as a refrigerant in cryogenic cycles and to provide nitrogen for nitride treatment of stainless steels. Nitrogen and hydrogen are combined at high temperatures. We have the expertise in terms of machine design with our KO³ compressor design software and specialists in material-technology to build NH₃ compressors either for normal temperature as well as for cryogenic applications.