Process Equipment Capabilities

A quality toll can only be achieved by tollers with properly designed and reliable equipment. Companies letting a toll contract should 

Preventive maintenance on vital equipment should be properly scheduled, carried out and documented. This program must be separate from the regulatory inspection. 

Examining a candidate toller s records of formal reporting and follow-up on mechanical deficiencies or hazardous conditions is imperative. The assessor should verify whether such a system is in place and is effective. 

The assessor should also find out whether an effective testing program is in place to help ensure the serviceability of process measurement equipment. The successful toller should have an established calibration program to address the accuracy of critical measurement equipment. Safety critical process parameters should be monitored and critical process equipment should automatically interlock when monitoring instrumentation detects safety critical deviations. Interlocks should either facilitate a remedy to the critical deviation or bring the process to the zero energy state. These instruments and interlocking devices should be routinely tested to ensure operational reliability. 

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Whereas the underlying separation or purification technology may be straightforward, the purity achieved is often far less than that which the separation processes are capable of producing. More often than not, recontamination by impurities released by the materials of constmction used in the purification, storage, and deUvery equipment represents the tme limit to the purity that can be achieved in practice. 

Heat Exchangers. Because a heat exchanger is a nearly universal item of process equipment, there is a wide variety of fast and capable software for such calculations. 

Specialty plants. These plants are capable of producing small amounts of a variety of products. Such plants are common in fine chemicals, pharmaceutic s, foods, and so on. In specialty plants, the margins are usually high, so factors such as energy costs are important but not life-and-death issues. As the production amounts are relatively small, it is not economically feasible to dedicate processing equipment to the manufac ture of only one product. Instead, batch processing is utilized so that several products (perhaps hundreds) can be manufactured with the same process equipment. The key issue in such plants is to manufacture consistently each product in accordance with its specifications. 

Equipment Suite An equipment suite is the collection of equipment available for producing a group of products. Normally, this group of products is similar in certain respects. For example, they might all be manufactured from the same major raw materials. Within the equipment suite, material transfer and metering capabilities are available for these raw materials. The equipment suite contains all of the necessary types of processing equipment (reactors, separators, and so on) reqiiired to convert the raw materials into salable products. A plant may consist of only one suite of equipment, but large plants usually contain multiple equipment suites. 

Examine the processing equipment to determine what processing capabilities are possible, and write phases to accomphsh each possible processing capability. 

More microprocessor-based process equipment, such as smart instruments and single-loop controllers, with digital communications capability are now becoming available and are used extensively in process plants. A fieldbus, which is a low-cost protocol, is necessary to perform efficient communication between the DCS and these devices. So-called mini-MAP architec ture was developed to satisfy process control and instrumentation requirements while incorporating existing ISA standards. It is intended to improve access time while... 

Available equip- Procure equipment that can be used in other ment determines processes (current or future) without operating the process chem- close to its operating envelope, istry selected., Provide equipment with comparable pressure Operating close to rating for the entire system the safe operating envelope of the batch sizes to equipment capabilities equipment and the relief capability. ... 

The principal technological changes in the engineering control of air pollution were the perfection of the motor-driven fan, which allowed large-scale gas-treating systems to be built the invention of the electrostatic precipitator, which made particulate control in many processes feasible and the development of a chemical engineering capability for the design of process equipment, which made the control of gas and vapor effluents feasible. 

An improving capability of plastics due to the appearance of new materials, improved qualities with existing types and better processing equipment. 

Where process capability relies upon the competence of personnel, personnel operating such processes need to be appropriately educated and trained and undergo examination of their competency. Where there is less reliance on personnel but more on the consistency of materials, environment, and processing equipment, operations should be monitored continuously by inspection, observation, or other techniques. 

Deflagration pressure containment is an approach for selecting the design pressure of a vessel so that it is capable of withstanding the maximum pressure resulting from an internal deflagration. Vessels or process equipment can be designed to either... 

Process/equipment/tools Produce service performance] Plant personnel capability ... 

In some cases, a simple increase in characteristic dimensions is sufficient to suppress micro-channel plugging [9, 10]. In the first euphoria about the new technical capabilities, miniaturization of processing equipment was possibly flogged to death. The motto therefore is as small as (beneficially) needed, but not as small as possible. 

It is important that any method chosen is scientifically sound under the conditions it will be applied. It is also necessary to demonstrate that the equipment, which will be used, is suitable and its use will not influence the results adversely. This includes all types of equipment, e.g. does the volumetric glassware have a suitable tolerance and do the instruments have sufficient sensitivity over the entire range of measurement The process for demonstrating equipment capability is called equipment qualification and is dealt with in Chapter 5. The staff carrying out validation need to be both qualified and competent in the tasks that they need to carry out. 

Automation and control of processing equipment by highly sophisticated computer control systems is becoming the standard at most hydrocarbon facilities. Automatic control provides for closer control of the process operating conditions and therefore increased efficiencies. Increased efficiencies allow higher production outputs. Automation is also thought to reduce operator manpower requirements. However other personnel are still needed to inspect and maintain the automatic controlling system. All process control systems should be monitored by operators and have the capability for backup control or override commands by human operators. 

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