Now that you have experience as a process engineer, you have decided to join a process control consultancy firm, PARAGON Consulting Sdn. Bhd.. You are hired because of your knowledge in chemical engineering, experience as a process engineer, and credentials. Since many of the firms engineers are electrical and mechanical engineers, your job scope includes: i) provide expertise to other engineers to understand, describe and analyze chemical processes, and ii) design automatic control systems for chemical processes. One Tuesday morning, you received the following email from the general manager:
To: Design Team <design.team@paragon.my> From: Abu Bakar Iman (abi@paragon.my> Date: 29/03/2011 11:00AM Subject: Design of automatic control system for CCM Chemicals Good day engineers, I had a meeting with CCM Chemicals plant manager last week. They are now having problems with the existing control systems of their chlorine gas absorption processes. To be specific, they are facing difficulty to maintain the process variables at the desired operating conditions. Plus, they are experiencing inconsistencies in the online measurement of the product specs too. There are two chlorine gas absorption columns operating, as part of Chloralkali Process for chlorine production, in the company. At the moment, CCM Chemicals is urgently looking for a prospective consultancy firm to solve these problems. Due to our excellent track record in the previous consultancy projects, theyve invited us to bid for this project. Therefore, I want your team to design/modify the automatic control systems for the chlorine gas absorption plants that can handle those problems. Make sure that you state concrete justifications if in any case you want to revamp the existing control systems or maintain the existing ones. As this is only a preliminary control system design, you dont have to include details on instrumentation, budget, or any other design particulars. As usual, you need to use established techniques for determining and designing control systems. Please ensure that you use the accepted selection guidelines for the proper selection of variables. Use the control design form to make your work more systematic. You should be able to justify whatever that you want to do. Evaluate if you should include more advanced control systems, such as feedforward, cascade, ratio, split-range and others if there is a need to do so. Enclosed are the process description and simplified PFD of the process plants thats all we got from CCM Chemicals. The information that we have right now is definitely not enough and there might be some errors. Therefore, they are willing to give you and your team a tour to the plant, at Pasir Gudang, next week. This is to help you understand the process better. But before you go, I want to see a detailed list of information that you need to find out from CCM Chemicals. Besides, I also want you to carry out a process review on chlorine absorption process (as part of chlor-alkali process) so that you have a picture about the process before you go to the plant. Guys, do this well! Youre representing our companys excellent reputation out there. Make sure you come up with a good proposal of the control system design and win the project. All the best! Best Regards, Abu Bakar Iman General Manager, PARAGON Consulting Sdn. Bhd. Page | 1
There are two chlorine gas absorption plants available at CCM Chemicals: Primary Chlorine Gas Absorber and Emergency Chlorine Gas Absorber, which both are equipped with chlorine gas absorber blower to suck up the inlet chlorine gas.
Primary Chlorine Gas Absorber Primary chlorine gas absorption process (Figure 1) is an absorption system to absorb the excess chlorine from the sub-sections of chlor-alkali process, for instance, electrolysis plant, brine dechlorination, etc. The absorption column is equipped with chlorine gas absorber blower, hypo tank (1), primary absorber pump and primary absorber cooler. In this plant, caustic soda is also recycled through the absorber and the hypo tank (1) by primary absorber pumps. During the plant operation, the small amount of chlorine gas released from the chlor-alkali process is absorbed into the caustic soda solution to produce sodium hypochlorite. The concentration of sodium hypochlorite in this plant is monitored by oxidation reduction potential (ORP) analyzer. Once the required concentration is achieved, the product is sent to sodium hypochlorite storage facility. Primary Chlorine Gas Absorber has no head tank. Therefore, the excess chlorine that cannot be absorbed through this column is passed to the Emergency Chlorine Gas Absorber. Emergency Chlorine Gas Absorber Emergency chlorine gas absorption process (Figure 2) is an absorption system to control the chlorine released on the occurrence of plant trip. In normal operation, no chlorine is passed to the process. High concentration of caustic soda solution is used as scrubbing agent to cater large amount of gas chlorine during plant trip. The absorption column is equipped with chlorine gas absorber blower, hypo tank (2), caustic deluge tank, emergency absorber cooler and emergency absorber pump. Residual chlorine that cannot be absorbed through this column is accumulated inside a head tank before it is recycled to the main stream of chlorine gas. Hypo tank (2) is used to hold sodium hypochlorite that is produced when chlorine gas is chemically scrubbed into the caustic soda solution. To maintain the liquid level inside the hypo tank (2) at 50% from the total tank capacity, recycle caustic soda solution is continuously filled into the hypo tank (2). Deluged caustic soda is recycled between Cl2 gas absorber and hypo tank (2) by emergency absorber pumps. Temperature of inlet stream into the absorption tower is controlled by emergency absorber cooler.
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WR
PI ORP
FT
Chlorine Gas From SP-501 Chlorine Gas From T-280 Chlorine Gas From SP-260
LI
LT PI PI
P-724A
P-724B
CCM Chemicals (M) Sdn Bhd PLO 411, Jalan Perak Satu, 81700 Pasir Gudang, Johor, MALAYSIA.
Process Flow Diagram (PFD): Primary Chlorine Gas Absorption Process Drawing No.: Scale: NTS Drawn: Checked: Date: March 29, 2011
MS-730 D-750
NA
LT
FT TT
AF-730
E-733
Chlorine Gas From E-420 WR
PT ORP
Chlorine Gas From SP-410 Chlorine Gas From R-230 Chlorine Gas From T-710
NA
LI
Hypo To T-710
LT PI PI
Hypo To D-720
P-744A
P-744B
P-744A
P-744B
CCM Chemicals (M) Sdn Bhd PLO 411, Jalan Perak Satu, 81700 Pasir Gudang, Johor, MALAYSIA.
Process Flow Diagram (PFD): Emergency Chlorine Gas Absorption Process Drawing No.: Scale: NTS Drawn: Checked: Date: March 29, 2011