Successful narrow-mindedness

Sometimes it pays to be narrow-minded! Just as it did at BP Chemical in Great Britain. There, senior management insisted that no outdated processes were to be used in the planned new plants for the production of vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) and ethyl acetate (ETAC). The demand was brief and to the point: "No repeats in technology". This caused a problem for the process technology manager, together with much more work - but it also brought the chance of creating something big.
With the help not only of the research center, but also of many specialists from various fields, such as chemical stream technologists and downstream fluid catalytic cracker experts, two new processes were developed: the Leap and Avada processes. Each of these was an international sensation.
AspenTech awarded Leap the "Award for Business Innovation" and AstraZeneca awarded Avada the new "Award for Excellence in Green Chemistry and Engineering". The plant for producing ETAC, the world's largest at 220,000 t/a, is worthy of mention from another point of view as well. The necessity of becoming acquainted with the process and the control system led BP, together with Hyprotech, to construct an out of the ordinary model of the plant.
This dynamic model of the process was used right across the whole project team to check on a diversity of assumptions and to uncover potential weak points. The article starting on page 30 describes how this procedure helped the participating engineers and technicians to successfully commission the process.

But which procedure is the right one when investment is to be made in an existing plant, and this is to be correspondingly expanded? One of the biggest problems in such a case can be how to survey the existing structures of the plant, with containers and piping, pumps and armatures, and integrate them in the new plans. An engineering specialist who participated in the development of the VAM process mentioned above offers an interesting solution to this problem.
Foster Wheeler scans existing plant structures with laser beams and transmits the data to a 3D-CAD program (page 44). With this method, large amounts of data can beacquired and made useful within a short time. With human support, a model of the plant can be subsequently prepared and be used by engineers for their further planning. In this way, the one or other plant now not up to date can again become a production unit with a future, even when senior management favours "No repeats in technology".

Frank Jablonski