Process equipment capacities

Once injection water treatment requirements have been established, process equipment must be sized to deal with the anticipated throughput. In a situation where water injection is the primary source of reservoir energy it is common to apply a voidage replacement policy, i.e. produced volumes are replaced by Injected volumes. An allowance above this capacity would be specified to cover equipment downtime. 

As with ah thin-film PV technologies, the projected manufacturing costs of a-Si H ahoy PV modules fah rapidly with annual manufacturing volume, ie, MWp /yr. The primary driver of this volume cost reduction is the volume—cost relationship of commercially available thin-film processing equipment. Thin-film coating machines often have capacities equivalent to 3—5 yr, so that manufacturing economies of scale are more fully realized at the... 

Suppliers process equipment and rates higher capacity units may be available. SO concentration includes sum of initial reaction gas plus equalizer diluent air. Nominal reaction gas velocity calculated in absence of organics. 

Equipment—client may not have the equipment required to manufacture a specific product. It may be that available capital and installation time are limited such that they simply can not design, acquire, install and test the process equipment to reach the desired capacity within the available budget and time. If a product is in the early stages of its life cycle, the capital required may be hard to justify. This could be based upon the low initial volume anticipated while developing the market or the need to take advantage of a time-sensitive business opportunity. Tolling can provide a means to safely produce introductoiy, short-term, or small volume products that would otherwise be uneconomic. 

The trend in gas plant design has been to maximize train capacity in an effort to take advantage of the economy of size. At the same time, gas plant designers are constrained by the maximum size of processing equipment of proven design. Table 3-4 shows the trend in gas plant train sizes in the last three decades. 

To illustrate how the control function requires extra capacity of process equipment, let us use a typical fractionation system, as shown in Figure 1. This sample illustrates the point being made rather than recommending any particular fractionation control scheme. The best... 

Figure 1. Typical fractionation system, which illustrates how process control requires extra equipment capacity.

Compounds considered carcinogenic that may be present in air emissions include benzene, butadiene, 1,2-dichloroethane, and vinyl chloride. A typical naphtha cracker at a petrochemical complex may release annually about 2,500 metric tons of alkenes, such as propylenes and ethylene, in producing 500,000 metric tons of ethylene. Boilers, process heaters, flares, and other process equipment (which in some cases may include catalyst regenerators) are responsible for the emission of PM (particulate matter), carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides (200 tpy), based on 500,000 tpy of ethylene capacity, and sulfur oxides (600 tpy). 

Excess resources can contribute to the Total Quality Management continuous improvement process Spare capacity provides resilience to unusual demands. Increasing resources does not necessttnly meitn more people, but it may be achieved by better design of jobs, equipment, or procedui.. s. 

Figure 5-5U. Shrouded turbine for high pumping capacity. Usually used with low static heads, creates minimum of direct shear. Courtesy of International Process Equipment Co., Div. of Patterson Foundry and Machine Co.

The first step is to determine the types of plant equipment and systems that are to be included in your program. A plant survey of your process equipment should be developed that lists every critical component within the plant and its impact on both production capacity and maintenance costs. A plant process layout is invaluable during this phase of program development. It is very easy to omit critical machines or components during the audit. Therefore, care should be taken to ensure that all components that can limit production capacity are included in your list. 

Troubleshooting deals with identifying and solving problems. Problems can be immediate or long term and can be associated with off-spec products, poor efficiency, process improvements, capacity increases, or potential shutdown items. Problems can be related to management, operation, hardware and equipment, or process issues. Solutions can include improved operating procedures and training, preventative maintenance, or installation of new equipment or controls. 

When the specified production capacities are low, processes based on batch reactors will usually have lower capital investment requirements than processes calling for continuous operation, so batch reactors are often preferred for new and untried processes during the initial stages of development. As production requirements increase in response to market demands, it may become more economic to shift to continuous processing but, even in these cases, there are many industrial situations where batch operation is preferable. This is particularly true when the operating expenses associated with the reactor are a minor fraction of total product cost. At low production capacities, construction and instrumentation requirements for batch reactors are usually cheaper than for continuous process equipment. Moreover, it is generally easier to start up, shut down, and control a batch reactor than a comparable capacity continuous flow reactor. 

A typical graph of k as a function of temperature is shown in Figure 3.6. The increasing slope shows the importance of determining a maximum allowable temperature in process equipment so that the heat removal capacity is not exceeded. Under adiabatic conditions, the temperature will reach the calculated maximum only if the reactants are depleted. The actual maximum temperature in a system with some heat dissipation will, of course, be somewhat lower than the calculated value. 

Charts, correlations, and tables in the sources cited earlier relate capital costs to various parameters characteristic of the equipment to be evaluated. Table B.2 lists typical parameters used to correlate equipment costs for common types of process equipment. Figure B.3 is an example of such correlations for the cost of heat exchangers as a function of exchanger area. These forms of cost curves generally appear as nearly straight lines on log-log plots, indicating a power-law relationship between capital cost and capacity, with exponents typically ranging from 0.5 to 0.8. 

The Advanced Environmental Services, Inc. (AESI), soil reclamation facility, American SoU Processing, in Marion, Iowa, includes on-site soil storage capacity and soU processing equipment. The Cedarapids soU remediation system (manufactured by Ratheon Company) used by AESI to treat contaminated soils by low-temperature thermal desorption is similar to that used by another vendor. See also Carlo Environmental Technologies, Inc., medium-temperature thermal desorption (T0142). 

Suppliers process equipment and rates higher capacity units may be available. 

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