Process plant definition

The fixed capital estimate depends on the definition of the plant. A grass-roots plant is a complete faciUty at a new location, including all utihties, services, storage faciUties, land, and improvements. If a process plant is located at an existing processing complex, it can usually share some of these auxihary faciUties. A battery-limits plant is defined as the process faciUty itself, so that the auxiUaries, off-site, and land-related items are excluded from the fixed capital estimation. However, a battery-limits plant maybe assigned allocated capital charges for the share of common utihty and service faciUties used by the plant. 

A single, all-embracing definition of human error is difficult to achieve. For the engineer, the worker in a system such as a chemical process plant may be... 

Pilot Plant—Chemical reaction hazards Influence of plant selection on hazards Definition of safe procedures Effects of expected variations in process conditions Definition of critical limits... 

There is also a certain amount of statistical information available on the failures of process system components. Arulanantham and Lees (1981) have studied pressure vessel and fired heater failures in process plants such as olefins plants. They define failure as a condition in which a crack, leak or other defect has developed in the equipment to the extent that repair or replacement is required, a definition which includes some of the potentially dangerous as well as all catastrophic failures. The failure rates of equipment are related to some extent to the safety of process items. If a piece of equipment has a long history of failures, it may cause safety problems in the future. Therefore it would be better to consider another equipment instead. It should be remembered that all reliability or failure information does not express safety directly, since all failures are not dangerous and not all accidents are due to failures of equipment. 

Service Facilities For a process plant, utihty services such as steam, water, electric power, fuel, compressed air, shop facilities, and a cafeteria require capital ejq)enditures. The cost of these facihties lumped together may be 10 to 20 percent of the fixed capital investment for a preliminary estimate. Note Buildings, yards, and service facihties must oe well defined to obtain a definitive or detailed estimate.)... 

The Gas Directive defines upstream pipelines as those which are part of a production project or which are used to convey natural gas from one or more such projects to a processing plant or terminal or final coastal landing terminal (Art. 2 No. 2). A primary question is if all Norwegian offshore pipelines are covered by this definition. 

Firstly, according to the wording, pipelines leading directly from the gas field to a coastal terminal abroad are upstream pipelines. Secondly, pipelines from the field to the processing plants on land are also covered. It does not exclude the application of the Gas Directive that parts of the processing of the gas take place onshore. The definition presupposes that transport of gas, which is not fully treated, is regulated by the Directive.9... 

It could be claimed, strictly according to the wording, that pipelines from processing plants on land to a coastal terminal are not covered by the definition to a processing plant... or a final coastal terminal (our italics). It would, however, have been somewhat odd if these pipelines were not treated in the same way as other offshore pipelines. Alternative solutions have obvious weaknesses. 

Both in the paper by Ramshaw and in the report from the UMIST conference, first definitions (or rather descriptions) of process intensification can be found. Ramshaw (11) describes PI as devising an exceedingly compact plant which reduces both the main plant item and the installation s costs, while according to Heggs (12) PI is concerned with order-of-magnitude reductions in process plant and equipment. In one of his subsequent papers, Ramshaw writes about typical equipment volume reduction by two or three orders of magnitude (13). 

The term contingencies covers many loopholes in cost estimation of process plants. The major loopholes include cost data inaccuracies, when applied to specific cases, and lack of complete definition of facilities required. 

There are various kinds of decision-making processes in the chemical industry field. An equipment/process/plant is improved or a new process/plant is built without definite knowledge of their consequences. When the definition of the degree of anxiety expressed in Eq. (6.7) is applied to decisionmaking, it sometimes becomes necessary to change the considerations regarding object and probability from anxiety to expectation and from the probability of occurrence of an undesirable event to the probability of success of desirable event. 

An important early step is the definition of system boundaries within which impacts are accounted for. A good example of the issues in system boundary definition is the case of utility systems. The process plant in Figure 6 may consume electricity, but this consumption implies impacts at the power station through fuel combustion and water use. For a coal-fired power station, this, in turn, implies impacts at the coal mine. If the plant consumes natural gas for heating, impacts in exploration, extraction, treatment, and compression of the natural gas are implied. The environmental impacts incurred in such utility systems have... 

In contrast to the OQ procedures where all parts of the plant and equipment are qualified separately, the PQ procedures qualify the entire plant with respect to the production process. The definition given for PQ is valid for retrospective validation as well as for prospective validation. While carrying out PQ processes, all necessary SOPs (e.g., for the use or cleaning of the plant) should be approved. Values of critical and noncritical process parameters recorded during PQ must be collected to evaluate the efficiency and performance of the plant. 

The quantity of work to be done must be defined by the appropriate time period, which could be by as little as a 15-minute interval for cashiers and as long as a day for paper mills. For continuous process industries, such as chemical plants and some mining processes, the definition of what is needed is relatively easy to determine. Even so, the work must be defined by the hour and day of the year to allow for maintenance and shutdowns for holidays. There are many other industries that also have a well-known stable demand for work profile—for example, prisons, long-term health care facilities, and many manufacturing systems, such as assembly lines. At the other end of the scale are situations such as retad outlets and telephone operators, that have a demand that varies constantly during the day, and from day to day, and from season to season. Many of the organizations with such a fluctuating demand pattern have a detailed data bank of historic data, usually by the 15-minute interval. These data can be used to predict the work requirements for future time periods. 

In order to have a definite chemical system to study, we have chosen a reactor which is probably not very realistic as a power producer, but one which has the advantage that we know both the design details of the fuel element and the cost and design data for the chemical processing plant in which this fuel element is presently handled. We have adopted an MTR type fuel element which is composed of enriched uranium aluminium alloy, but we have assumed that the is replaced by Since any thermal reactor power economy... 

We shall define a process plant project as the execution of a plan to build or modify a process plant, within stated parameters of workscope, plant performance, cost, and time. This is not a universally accepted definition, but it does focus on the work with which the project engineer is principally engaged. Pre-project work will be described as a study or proposal. 

Pre-project work starts with an idea or concept which the client has decided to develop. The concept and design of the final process plant progresses in cycles of increasing definition. Initially a study is made, in which the concept is technically developed, optimized, and analysed as a business proposition the analysis includes considerations of technical and commercial risk, capital and operational cost, product value, and return on investment. A report is prepared if the conclusions are acceptable to the client, he may authorize the implementation of the project. Alternatively, he may authorize more funds for further conceptual development, or, of course, abandon the concept. Authorization of the implementation of the project invariably implies the expectation of a plant which will perform within specified limits, and be built in accordance with certain standards, within a promised budget and schedule. 

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