Refineries and petrochemical plants use large volumes of water for indirect cooling. The cooling tower (Fig. 1) removes heat from water via evaporation and returns the water to the heat exchangers to ..
Deaerators remove dissolved oxygen from boiler feedwater to prevent corrosion of downstream components such as feedwater heaters, economizers and boilers. Dissolved oxygen has retrograde solubility, i..
Most refineries and chemical plants inspect the waterside of each fired boiler during the annual or bi-annual outage. The purpose of this inspection is to ensure that the corrosion and deposit control..
Manufacturers have improved the reliability of online hardness analyzers, increasing the feasibility to automate many water treatment units. The most common applications are boiler feedwater quality a..
Refineries and petrochemical plants have a large number of heat exchangers. Maintaining reliability and heat transfer efficiency of these heat exchangers is critical to optimizing refinery operation..
Water pretreatment for boilers operating below 1,000 psig (6.89 MPA) requires removal of scale-producing cations (calcium and magnesium) from filtered water. The common term for calcium and magnesium ..
Part 1 of this column (November 2003) discussed operational complexity, waste stream characterization and free oil removal. This part discusses unit operations for emulsified oil, biological treatment..
Every refinery has a treatment plant to remove petroleum contaminants, hazardous materials and suspended solids from wastewater prior to discharge to the local watershed or publicly owned treatment fa..
Reboilers use steam to provide heat transfer in a variety of distillation, purification and separation processes in refinery units such as gas plants, alkylation, sulfur recovery, aroma..
Alkalinity is naturally present in raw water and is an important control parameter in boilers with softened water make-up and cooling water systems. Understanding alkalinity requires underst..