Ahmedabad Engineering Students Visit Deepak Nitrite Limited’s Manufacturing Facility for Overview of Chemical Process Industry

On a recent industrial visit to Deepak Nitrite Limited (DNL) at Nandesari, Vadodara, students of BTech in Chemical Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science explored its manufacturing facility to get an overview of the technology and processes employed in the Chemical Process industry. Harshad Shah, Visiting Professor; Arijit Ganguli, Assistant Professor; Alok Gosalia of the Career Development Centre; and Girish Shah, manager of the Chemical Engineering laboratory at the School, led the industrial visit.

A senior technical executive of DNL explained the working of different equipment of the three Sodium Nitrite plants. Students and faculty also visited the organic manufacturing facilities where they got an opportunity to observe the separation or the Mass Transfer Operation of the components of the mixture and the functioning of several units like reactors, boilers, distillation columns, absorption columns, evaporators, etc. DNL representatives also gave the students an overview of packed towers and coal-fired boilers and the reasoning behind the colour coding of pipelines. The students observed self-supported distillation columns (tall vertical vessels), 62 metres in height and 2.5 metres in diameter. They also learnt about Distributed Control Systems (DCS) of their wastewater treatment and, importantly, about Mechanical Vapour Recompression (MVR), the recent development in zero discharge technology.