Fluidflow helped prove that a steam header system did not have the required capacity for a proposed project. This resulted in the redirection of the capital dollars and a saving of approximately $800k

Company Profile:

TECSAR is an independent, employee owned, consulting engineering company, established in 1980. Since that time, the company continues to grow in range and depth to provide professional services to Industrial clientele throughout Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Quebec and Alberta.

Initially concentrating on the petrochemical and refinery industries, the company’s expertise now covers a wide range of associated process refining and manufacturing industries. Brewing, Distillation, Bio Diesels, Ethanol, Alcohol, Power Generation, Agri Foods, Ammonia Plants etc. are among the client portfolio served.

Projects Overview:

A client was experiencing water hammer in a process water cooling exchanger due to flashed steam collapsing. The result was noise, vibration, and damage/failure of the exchanger.

This project required the relocation of a flow control valve to the exchanger outlet to maximise pressure until the process water was cooled, thereby preventing the hammer.

Challenges:

The relocation of this control valve would change the flow distribution of the water in the network which needed to be corrected with the installation of additional new and modified control valves. This effort was complicated by the fact that the client needed to make these changes online and therefore our design options were confined to the few tie-in locations which were not in the ideal location for the flow balance.

FluidFlow & Tecsar

With the use of FluidFlow, we were able to assess each of the possible on-line tie-in locations (each with multiple operating cases) and rule out those that could not be made to function adequately for all operating scenarios.

FluidFlow helped Tecsar:

  • Allowed for easy evaluation of multiple case scenarios which has provided us with the ability to identify bottlenecks for any foreseeable flow case
  • Proved to clients that the bottlenecks or problems with their systems are not where they initially believed them to be
  • Resulted in field changes that fix the complete problem rather than a portion of it

In one case we used the software to prove to a client that a steam header system did not have the required capacity for a proposed project. This resulted in the redirection of the capital dollars and a saving of approximately $800k

Impact

Previously, this analysis would have been handled via a combination of manual calculation and spreadsheets. Evaluating the multiple options would have been very time consuming. Our previous software would not have had the ability to converge under many of the scenarios provided.

The system was commissioned and is operating exactly as per
the FluidFlow predictions.

The client is very pleased with the results, especially given that we were able to avoid an outage for these changes. The avoidance of a site outage is of significant value.