Chemical Processing-August 2008

the remoteness of the Spring Gully site and the high degree of process customization, the IMS facility was successfully brought online in December 2007. e current production capacity is nine million liters per day (MLD) day, and the IMS can be expanded to support up to 15 MLD. IMS has already garnered a lot of interest from other sites, both in Australia and North America. “Note that another new application of this technology is in ethanol production, where lots of water is used to generate the steam required in the distillation process. We are breaking into this market now. It’s not a standard technology on all new ethanol plants, but it is the future technology so we are leading the way here,” adds Wines. Interest also is burgeoning in the company’s ceramic-based MF units. ese allow smaller ﬂocs of bacteria to circulate, resulting is a very clean permeate and thus no need for a clarifying stage. SINGAPORE SUCCESS Meanwhile, Siemens, Erlangen, Germany, which owns USFilter, in June received a $3-million grant from Singapore’s Environment and Water Industry Development Council (EWI) to develop innovative seawater desalination technology that relies on an electric ﬁeld to remove salts. e aim is to reduce energy consumption by 50% compared with existing desalination methods. Siemens will use the funding for work at the company’s global R&D center in Singapore. e process integrates electrodialysis, ion exchange softening and a ﬁnal desalting step using a novel continuous electrodeionization process to drive salt separation with minimum energy demand. EWI’s challenge required demonstration of energy consumption of 1.5 kWh/m3, which is about half of what has been achieved with the best available technology. Operating desalination plants typically consume as much as 10 kWh/m3. Siemens also is moving ahead on the commercial front. In March, it acquired the Chemitreat Group, Singapore, which had sales of more than $40 million last year, employs 240 people and provides watertreatment technologies and services in Singapore, ailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and China. COOLING WATER CHALLENGES At many plants, water plays a key role in cooling process streams. Cooling systems routinely are pushed to capacity. When stressed to their technical limits, upset conditions result in expensive operational problems such as scale, corrosion and fouling. is has oﬀered a growing opportunity to Nalco, Naperville, Ill., for its 3D Trasar. is technology measures key system parameters, detects upsets, takes appropriate corrective action and communicates with system users. According to the company, it provides reliability under high-stress operating conditions and delivers the lowest possible total cost of operation (TCO) for cooling operations. And the numbers back up the claims. For example, the operator of a petrochemical plant in France was struggling to overcome scale and corrosion problems. Implementation of a 3D Trasar program led to use of a more eﬀective corrosion inhibitor and a better control strategy. Visual inspections of heat exchangers and corrosion coupons veriﬁed signiﬁcant improvement: an overall reduction of $206,000/yr. in TCO, including $63,000/yr. in heat exchanger cleaning, retubing and repair costs. Another example is a Gulf Coast chemical plant where calcium phosphate fouling in one critical heat exchanger led to a $250,000 revenue loss. After implementing a 3D Trasar program, total inorganic phosphate was reduced by 50% to 10 ppm from 20 ppm and the critical heat exchanger operated at near-design http://www.intersystems.net http://www.intersystems.net

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chemical Processing-August 2008

Chemical Processing- August 2008 Contents From the Editor ChemicalProcessing.com Field Notes In Process Energy Saver Compliance Advisor Protect your Plant What’s on Tap for Water? Keep Operations Safe Polystyrene Plant Gains Extra Output and More Process Puzzler Plant InSites Equipment & Services Adlits Product Spotlight/Classifieds Ad Index End Point

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