The production of urea, a critical component in the fertilizer industry, involves highly corrosive environments, particularly in the high-pressure sections of the process. This necessitates the use of advanced materials that can withstand such aggressive conditions to ensure long life and efficiency of urea production plants. Alleima, Stamicarbon, Saipem and TOYO report on their advanced material and equipment solutions for the urea industry.
In Part 3 of this series on stripper efficiency issues, we continue the discussion on some some of the many causes of lower stripper efficiency. Here we discuss liquid divider fouling and bad installation of liquid dividers.
A plant operating a spent acid decomposition furnace as part of its sulphuric acid production facility desired to increase acid production primarily by processing additional spent acid while making minimal modifications to the plant equipment and operations. The Messer solution entailed introducing oxygen in two steps, both as an enrichment to the combustion air and by direct injection into the furnace. The resulting performance improvements exceeded the project objectives for acid production and spent acid decomposition, without increasing NOx emissions. This paper provides a summary of the system start-up and tuning and presents the resulting improvements and lessons learned.
The reliability of primary reformers is a key issue for syngas plants. In this article O. Chung, N. Goodman and C. Thomas of Quest Integrity describe the damage mechanisms and material limitations that impact the reliability of reformer outlet systems and the improvements that may be implemented.
MECS, Inc. (MECS) has developed a new impaction-based mist eliminator called Brink® Prime Impact™ , which offers equivalent or improved efficiency at higher throughput and the same pressure drop as traditional impaction beds, resulting in the ability to debottleneck existing inter-pass absorption towers and final absorption towers in sulphuric acid plants or design new or replacement towers with smaller diameters, thus reducing investment cost.
Gouda Refractories continues to upgrade its refractory solutions for the sulphur recovery industry as well as developing new superior products for installations operating at higher temperatures due to oxygen enrichment.
In this review article, Hatch’s Jayden Ladebruk, Lyndsay Tran, Amelia Parrenin, and Edward DeRose outline the wide range of phosphoric acid production technologies, and discuss how industry challenges are influencing the choice of phosphoric acid process.
Mathijs Sijpkes, Nuria Pascual Vasco and Jan Hermans of Sulphurnet discuss the importance of a whole life cycle cost analysis at the conceptual design phase when making investment decisions about new sulphur processing facilities.
Advances in technology, equipment and reagents are enhancing phosphate fertilizer production. Optimisation of standard equipment is also vital for ensuring process efficiency.
The refurbishment and modernisation of fertilizer plants offers the opportunity to reduce operating costs, raise production capacity, improve energy efficiency and cut emissions.