Improved plant design

By economic consideration, the optimum amount of review and re-work, and hence the optimum amount of engineering, has been performed when a trade-off is reached between the benefit of review and the associated costs. The benefit, for this purpose, is the added value in terms of improved plant design and reduced construction cost with reduced error rectification. 

The next generation of gas turbine-based, combined-cycle power plants, under constmction in many parts of the world, is to feature net plant efficiencies in the 60% range based on LHV of fuel input. These faciUties, scheduled for start-up in the latter 1990s, are anchored by large gas turbines capable of simple-cycle efficiencies >40% LHV in some cases. To develop these machines, manufacturers have scaled up and improved upon designs that have already proved to be highly rehable. 

The vertices are connected with hues indicating information flow. Measurements from the plant flow to plant data, where raw measurements are converted to typical engineering units. The plant data information flows via reconciliation, rec tification, and interpretation to the plant model. The results of the model (i.e., troubleshooting, model building, or parameter estimation) are then used to improve plant operation through remedial action, control, and design. 

Improving the economics of gas plant design, construction, and operations is essential to ensure the approval of future de-bottlenecking, capacity expansion, and new projects. The economics include not only capital investment, life cycle operations, and maintenance costs, but also the monetary equivalents of safety, reliability, and availability. 

Most than 500 plant design or operation improvements were identified by licei " of the improvements were procedural/operational changes 40% were design/hardware c ew... 

Suppose now that a pilot-plant or full-scale reactor has been built and operated. How can its performance be used to confirm the kinetic and transport models and to improve future designs Reactor analysis begins with an operating reactor and seeks to understand several interrelated aspects of actual performance kinetics, flow patterns, mixing, mass transfer, and heat transfer. This chapter is concerned with the analysis of flow and mixing processes and their interactions with kinetics. It uses residence time theory as the major tool for the analysis. 

As time goes on, more and more people are being involved in these types of plant design. Most chemical companies estimate that 50% of their profits 10 years hence will come from products not currently known to their research laboratories. Since these will compete with other products now on the market, there will be a great need for improving present processes and estimating a rival s financial status. 

The difficulty in utilizing accident reports lies in the lack of accident report standards. Reports vary a lot how they document the details of the accident itself, the path to the final event, the causes, and the consequences. Still the reports can tell much experience based information which can - and should be - utilized in designing new plants. In fact a major goal in improving the design of safe... 

In the conversion of fossil and nuclear energy to electricity, the value of high temperature solution phase thermodynamics in improving plant reliability has been far less obvious than that of classical thermodynamics in predicting Carnot cycle efficiency. Experimental studies under conditions appropriate to modern boiler plant are difficult and with little pressure from designers for such studies this area of thermodynamic study has been seriously neglected until the last decade or two. 

By far the most important derivative of sulfuric acid is phosphoric acid. It has been unknowingly used as fertilizer for hundreds of years. The wet process method of manufacture was important until 1920, when furnace acid began increasing in popularity. The wet process, however, has made a comeback because of plant design improvements 60% of phosphoric acid was made by this method in 1954, 88% in 1974, and over 90% currently. The furnace process is used only to make concentrated acid (75-85%) and pure product. It is very expensive because of the 2000 °C temperature required. In the furnace process phosphate rock is heated with sand and coke to give elemental phosphorus, which is then oxidized and hydrated to phosphoric acid. A simplified chemical reaction is ... 

The PSO-Eltra project is a Pre-pilot SOFC production plant designed to scale-up existing laboratory production methods, build the necessary know-how for establishing industrial production, improve reproduction possibilities and develop non-destructive methods for production control. The project ran from 2001-2003, participants included Riso, HaldorTopsoe, and Eltra. 

TVA Process (Refs 85, 93 102). In 1933 the Tennessee Valley Authority inherited a World War I plant designed to produce ammonia by a roundabout and obsolete method in the following steps first the manuf of lime and subsequently f a carbide, then Ca cyan amide, ammonia, nitric acid and finally AN. In 1940 a modern high-pressure ammonia plant was constructed, in which there were used an improved ammonia synthesis cataiysr and a water-gas conversion catalyst. During WW II, the TVA produced... 

Loss prevention principles are dynamic tools, changing as needed to keep up with improving methods. A new edition of the LPP manual, containing several hundred pages, is published every two years. Part of the safety and loss prevention responsibility of Dow employees is to make certain that improved methods appear in the next edition of the LPP manual. The current (1986) edition contains 94 loss protection principles addressing 17 major elements of plant design. 

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