Planning experiments plant operations

The whole membrane module is composed of six racks, each of them consisting of eleven pressure vessels, operated in parallel, designed to house one spiral wound membrane each. The pressure vessels were originally equipped with cellulose acetate membranes specifically developed for PRO. During the first period, the plant operation has been optimized and the performance has been monitored, resulting in a power density lower than 0.5 W/m. Next, thin film composite membranes developed for PRO were installed in early 2011. So far the measured power density has reached nearly 1 W/m, which is a major improvement compared to the cellulose acetate membranes originally installed. Based on this preliminary experience, Statkraft plans to build a full-scale 25 MW osmotic power plant by 2015 [20]. 

Reactor maintainability. The reactor plant operating experience has demonstrated quite acceptable maintainability of the integral LMFR. There have been no additional difficulties in repairing primary system components on BN-600 compared with BN-350. Repairs of the reactor equipment items and sodium systems, including such complicated operations as replacement of the reactor coolant pumps and SG modules, re-arrangement and jacketing of primary sodium systems, extraction of distorted items from the reactor core, etc. had virtually no influence on the duration of planned outages, which were defined, as a rule, by inspections and preventive maintenance of the steam-water system components. 

Pilot-plant design specifications should be estabUshed only after careful consideration of the experimental program because decisions on the accuracy of instmments, analyzers, and other equipment should be based on the requirements of the experiments planned for the unit. FlexibiUty and versatihty ate important but costly when provided unnecessarily or too profusely they can result in a unit that is difficult or impossible to operate successfully... 

Pilot-plant start-up is different from principal process plant start because of the smaller scale of the unit, smaller resources committed, lack of advance start-up planning, and limited experience with the pilot-plant process and operation. 

The need for skill and experience on the part of sample designers and persoimel cannot be overemphasized in chemical plant sampling. Safety precautions are of the utmost importance. Necessary steps must be taken to document the hazards involved in an operation and to ensure that the staff are weU-trained, informed, protected, and capable. Except for bulk powder sampling, most chemical plant sampling is hazardous and difficult and must be designed with care. The following discussions are based on the assumptions that most of these decisions have been made and a satisfactory sampling procedure has been planned. 

It is therefore essential that a planned maintenance program be established, which can encompass all (or elements of) the different maintenance methods of establishing the frequency and/or work to be carried out. This programming requires skills that, in most instances, can have only been gained by experience in the field of maintenance and operation. Operation must play an important part in the programming. If the planned maintenance program is prepared without due consideration of the demands placed on the operation element, the program would probably collapse when the plant s equipment could not be released (i.e. switched off) when the maintenance technician arrived at the plant to carry out his duties indicated on his work docket. 

Plant and equipment that require a service on completion of a certain specified period of hours may, through experience, be catered for on a fixed frequency basis. If employed, this method avoids the need to record running hours (or, in the case of transport, mileage) on a daily or weekly basis to schedule the relevant planned maintenance. If it is essential that the maintenance of the plant and equipment be carried out on the completion of a certain number of operating hours or mileage, then this must be allowed for in the allocated work hours of the relevant trade group. 

The planning and design were carried out by the engineering firm who also built the plant and who had on its staff a designer with long experience in laboratory planning. They worked in close cooperation with the laboratory operator. 

When appropriate material systems are not available for model experiments, accurate simulation of the working conditions of an industrial plant on a laboratory- or bench-scale may not be possible. Under such conditions, experiments on differently sized equipment are customarily performed before extrapolation of the results to the full-scale operation. Sometimes this expensive and basically unreliable procedure can be replaced by a well-planned experimental strategy. Namely, the process in question can be either divided up into parts which are then investigated separately (Example 9 Drag resistance of a ship s hull after Froude) or certain similarity criteria can be deliberately abandoned and then their effect on the entire process checked (Example 41/2 Simultaneous mass and heat transfer in a catalytic fixed bed reactor after Damkohler). 

Also under development is an advanced 500-MWe HWR in India, and construction of such units is planned. This HWR design takes advantage of experience feedback from the 220-MWe HWR plants of indigenous design operating in India. 

The objective of the experiments carried out in this pilot plant was to determine the optimal values of some operational parameters, such as biomass concentration, transmembrane pressure, flow rate, and hydrauhc retention time, the last defined as the relationship between the volume of the bioreactor and the daily flow discharge of permeate. The working plan was as follows ... 

In order to gain experience in the process outlined in HSG 254 it was agreed that a Hull site plant would be used in the pilot. A review session was planned with operational and technical representatives from the plant together with the local Health Safety Executive Regulatory Inspectors and the author of HSG 254 who lead the review process. 

These problems indicate the pressing need for methods to predict the deposition properties of solid fuels. This is required for operation and control of existing plants. However, this information is also significant in the planning of new plants to use difficult fuels or fuels on which little experience is available. 

Both Bayer and InfraServ Knapsack carry out similar projects in their design departments. A project can include conceptual process design as well as basic and detail engineering. For the modeling, simulation, and optimization of chemical processes, several tools like CHEMCAD [592] or Aspen Plus [516] are used. In addition, laboratory experiments may be required to determine reaction parameters or other physicochemical data. A project can also include the planning, construction, operation, and analysis of a pilot plant. Depending on the customer s demands, not all of these project phases are executed. 

Indeed, we believe that the perspectives of applicative developments of electropolymerization suffer from the same limitations one could find in other sectors of electro-organic technology the comparison between well established conventional processes and processes adopting new technologies is too often favorable to the conventional ones for many and varied reasons (process experience, reliability, confidence in operation of the plants, conservative management etc.). Therefore new technologies have to prove to be much more convenient and able to solve or to overcome important and dramatic failures of the existing processes to be considered as alternatives when new industrial production is planned. 

---