Saturday, June 27, 2009

Jelly

Jellying is something bad stuff that might occur when dealing or processing liquid most of the time. It might occur directly or indirectly along the process line or even during the storage. Proper guideline is very necessary when dealing with production that having more than one train and even having slightly different configuration. The configuration might not be big difference on the process technology but there might be small differences in using the chemicals when injecting them to prevent corrosion, fouling, or waxing. This eventually will give big impact on the products.

This jellying is not only might occur due to temperature difference but due to different chemical presence in the different train which end up to the same storage tank. This is mainly because of the different chemicals used might cause undesired reaction which gives emulsion to the mixture of different streams. This emulsion eventually might give billions of dollar losses. So, it is really important to evaluate the proper chemicals to be used if there are more than one trains that streaming to same storage tanks.

This is crucially important when dealing with different vendors for the chemical supply. Sometime the owner or operator might want to see the significant benefit from different vendors which might end up with something bad stuffs. So, as a owner of the plant, need to conduct small lab analysis of emulsion for different chemicals sources. Or, the owner might use only vendor at one particular time to see the significant benefits.

Some people might argue that this might be very ridiculous mistake that can be done by human being. However, this is the fact that human errors are come from very ridiculous errors which end up with quite significant impact. This is phenomenon has happened in one of the plant or refinery which caused million dollars losses and some of end users sued the refinery due to consequent impact to their equipments. Luckily the product sold off is not fully distributed to the end users and remedies are given to the affected end users.

Since this already had happened in the refinery/plant itself where they have their own expertise in that particular area. So, there is possibility of to happen it again in end users since there is using different products from different supplier which can cause similar phenomena. This is not simply postulate done from the incident happened in plant/refinery but can be seen lot of cars, machineries, etc that end up with blockage of fuel line and need quite frequent cleaning or maintenance.

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