Casual Process Engineer

🔗 How these notes work | Disclaimer | Roadmap | 🔈 Announcements

Casual Process Engineer is a site I started putting together as a bit of an experiment in June 2023. It is an interlinked collection of (mostly) useful insights for the chemical or process engineer that I’ve amalgamated in my career so far.

It is not the intention of these notes to regurgitate text books; others have researched and documented technical topics in great detail already. Instead, this is a place of topic summaries, my own extensions of technical works, links to key resources, and reminders of useful bits-and-pieces that I find myself using over and over again.

No AI tools have been used to create any part of these notes—and never will be.

Contact

If you are interested in contributing to the project, have content requests, or spot any errors or inconsistencies, then I would greatly appreciate it if you got in touch: ✉️ contact@casualprocessengineer.com

How these notes work

This set of notes is interlinked, following a non-linear thinking / second brain approach, and is intended to be navigated organically in a similar way to wikipedia. It is in constant development and you may come across blank landing pages here and there waiting for some notes. I would greatly appreciate it if you got in touch if you happen upon errors.

The notes do not have a starting point, but I have put together a series of tags to help navigate. To date, non-exhaustively, and in loose categories these are:

Topics

Fluids PressureRelief ProcessControl GravityFlow ProcessSafety Commissioning ProcessSimulation STEM Thermodynamics Design

Equipment

HeatExchangers Pumps Compressors

Technologies

Watch this space. I’d like to expand into rough-and-ready aide memoirs to common processing technologies such as ‘amine gas sweeting’, ‘methanol synthesis’, or ‘chlorine electrolysis’ when I find the time.

Refrigeration Hydrogen CCS CoolingWater

Process simulation

Notes on the use of process simulation tools:

Standalone pages

Miscellaneous things that don’t neatly fall into one of the above categories:

Nomenclature

  • A list of acronyms used through these notes can be found here.
  • Generally units are SI unless otherwise specified.

Disclaimer

Warning

You should not be directly using or referencing anything you find on this website in calculations in a professional environment or otherwise without first verifying the methodology for yourself.

I am just a single person trying to share titbits of insight and obviously do not appreciate the nuances of your applications. Remember there is no substitute for good engineering judgement. Use of any information from this site is entirely on you.

Some wise words from the Engineering Council

Engineering professionals have a duty to acquire and use wisely the understanding, knowledge and skills needed to perform their role.

They should:

  • always act with care
  • perform services only in areas in which they are currently competent or under competent supervision
  • keep their knowledge and skills up to date
  • assist the development of engineering knowledge and skills in others
  • present and review theory, evidence and interpretation honestly, accurately, objectively and without bias, while respecting reasoned alternative views
  • identify, evaluate, quantify, mitigate and manage risks
  • not knowingly mislead or allow others to be misled

You have been warned.

Updates

Change-log

2026

  • March
    • Moved site over from Obsidian Publish to Quartz4. See 2026-03-27.

Roadmap

Things in the pipeline for future publishing.

  • pH and ORP measurement
  • Technology overviews
    • Chlorine systems
    • Refrigeration units
  • Plant commissioning lessons learnt.

Graph View

Backlinks