Reduced Shutdowns Due To Coking In Vaporation Unit

Situation

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In the chemical production process, a solvent is reacted in an evaporation and reaction unit. It was desired to increase the runtime of the plant and hence to analyze if the process parameters could be altered to increase the production from the plant.

Problem

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The plant struggled with coking while the product was cooled down. This issue was accompanied with an increase in the pressure loss of the process which eventually led to plant shutdown.

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Solution

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• Identify possible influence factors causing the coking and pressure loss in the plant
• Mitigate or even eliminate the coking and pressure losses by improving process operation
• Increase the runtime by reducing the amount of shutdowns

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Challenges

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No tool was available to simply and easily investigate process problems.

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Approach

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• Add the decisive tags and search for all possible runs of the plant during the last 6 months
• Sort the search results, checking for a set maximum running time of the plant
• Use layer comparison functionality to compare a normal run with the best case run
• Export the data to excel to plot the duration versus average pressure in order to check the dependence of the runtime on the pressure

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Results

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• A fast and easy analysis was performed showing the possibility of running the plant for a longer period if the temperature and pressure profiles were better controlled.
• The feed in the best process operation was seen to be higher than in the normal operation which gave valuable insights into production.
• Less noise was noticed during the best operation, but this was due to some improvement activities carried out specifically for this.

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