REVAMPING & UPGRADATION OF NITROGEN PLANTS
Airgases Projects team with its deep insights of design various nitrogen plants, both gaseous nitrogen plants and liquid nitrogen plants offered by various international suppliers is in unique position to undertake revamping and up-gradation of any existing Nitrogen Plants by incorporating latest technological advances and alternate operating methods for improving efficiency and safe operation. We would assess the capabilities of the existing plant and then recommend the refurbishing and upgrades to be implemented.
Airgases Projects provides following services related to pre-owned plants:
- Plant Re-lifing & Modification
- Plant Relocations
- Plant capacity enhancement
Some of commonly used revamping and upgrade measures used on these plants are listed below:
Gaseous Nitrogen plants
- Increase of production capacity of existing plants by minimum changes/ addition of new equipment. Airgases Projects team has this unique ability not available elsewhere. The idea is to maximise capabilities of existing equipment ( and many equipment in a nitrogen plant have excess capacity) and readjust some product mix like reduce liquid product etc.
- Undertake modification to allow plant to operate to different operating mode like liquid inject mode to increase gas production capacity and reduce specific power. Many captive plants operate plant with good liquid product mix and once tanks are full, the plant continues to be operated in inefficient mode. The modifications will allow plant to be operated in alternate mode to increase gas production and/or improve power efficiency.
- Assessment of performance of compressors along with suction filters & coolers and suggest improvement of performance of compressors.
- Replace mechanical refrigeration unit ( most maintenance prone equipment) with a pre-cooling system involving evaporation coolers and direct cooled air coolers
- Replacing electrical heating in Mol Sieve unit by steam heating or flue gas heating if such medium is available
- Evaluate performance of MHE and cleaning up of partially choked MHE by explosion blowing
- Assessment of refrigeration requirement of the plant based on warm end losses & various heat in leak etc and suggest remedial measures for improvement in plant performance
- Implementation of remote operation of ASU
Liquid Nitrogen plants
There are hundreds of small liquid nitrogen plants spread over all of India. These are primarily located at animal husbandry departments, government research institutes, educational institutes and other small quantity users. These customers typically own these plants because due to small quantity requirement either price of liquid nitrogen offered by gas companies is too high and/ or supplies of liquid nitrogen is not reliable which adversely impacts their operations. However these customers typically have no technical team with required expertise in maintenance of these plants. As a result a big number of these plants today remain idle and unused. Though some of these customers tie up with plant suppliers with an AMC, for plant supplier the effort required to be made are not commensurate with AMC charges. The plant suppliers do not provide much attention and as a result customer suffers.
Airgases Projects offers following services
- Servicing of liquefier in case of sterling cycle plants
- Service of expansion turbines in case of cryogenic air separation type liquid nitrogen plants
- Arranging servicing of air compressor and refrigeration dryers through OEM.
- Arranging servicing of PSA unit including replacement of sieves
- Servicing of PLC and other instrumentation
