Maintenance procedures, pilot plants

Pilot plants are often more hazardous than process plants, even though they are smaller ia size, for many reasons. These iaclude a tendency to relax standard safety review procedures based on the small scale, exceptionally qualified personnel iavolved, and the experimental nature of the research operations the lack of estabhshed operational practice and experience lack of information regarding new materials or processes and lack of effective automatic iatedocks due to the frequendy changing nature of pilot-plant operations, the desire for wide latitude in operating conditions, and the lack of hill-time maintenance personnel. 

The objective of the present study is to develop a cross-flow filtration module operated under low transmembrane pressure drop that can result in high permeate flux, and also to demonstrate the efficient use of such a module to continuously separate wax from ultrafine iron catalyst particles from simulated FTS catalyst/ wax slurry products from an SBCR pilot plant unit. An important goal of this research was to monitor and record cross-flow flux measurements over a longterm time-on-stream (TOS) period (500+ h). Two types (active and passive) of permeate flux maintenance procedures were developed and tested during this study. Depending on the efficiency of different flux maintenance or filter media cleaning procedures employed over the long-term test to stabilize the flux over time, the most efficient procedure can be selected for further development and cost optimization. The effect of mono-olefins and aliphatic alcohols on permeate flux and on the efficiency of the filter membrane for catalyst/wax separation was also studied. 

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