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On a few substation and URD upgrades lately, the real bottleneck hasn’t been cable rating or relay settings. It’s duct bank and soil behavior. After the first hot summer, we logged cable temps higher than our model, and the common thread was dry-out around the encasement or a field swap to a “standard” backfill that met strength/compaction but had poor thermal performance.Civil specs I see often center on compressive strength, slump, and density. Fair, but those choices can push us toward CLSM o...
Icelandic firm Carbon Recycling International (CRI) recently delivered the largest of its kind e-methanol reactor for the Liaoyuan E-Methanol Project in
In substation upgrades, the critical path is rarely the steel and wire. It is the outage window and the parts you cannot rush: relays, CTs, breakers, and the occasional transformer. Ops gives you two weekends in October, procurement says 40 weeks, and the program wants the feeder back before summer. I see a lot of schedules that ignore that math.What has helped on my projects: lock outage windows with operations early and drive the plan to those dates. Place long lead POs off a functional spec a...
I see substation upgrade schedules slip less from engineering effort and more from decision timing. The outage window owns the critical path. If SCADA point lists, protection philosophy, or relay comms modes are still open 4-6 weeks out, you are gambling with crew time and switching plans.What helped on recent jobs was a simple set of gates: a design freeze at 60%, a settings and point list freeze 12 weeks before outage, and an energization package review 4 weeks out. Each gate has owners on ope...
On this episode of the Chemical Engineering Podcast, senior editor Scott Jenkins welcomes Sameer Parvathikar, senior director of sustainable energy
We’ve been tightening up VOC control on our solvent drum/tote lines. We moved from open bung filling to closed-loop heads with vapor return to a header tied into a carbon bed. Emissions dropped and the room smells better, but we ran into backpressure swings that slowed fills and created occasional drips at disconnect. We stabilized it with a backpressure regulator on the header, pressure transmitters at the fill skids, and a short pause before decoupling to let the return equalize. Throughput is...
H2BE and INEOS Ltd. (London) announced that they have agreed preliminary commercial terms for the offtake of low-carbon hydrogen from H2BE, with an aim of
Had a lovely 2 am chorus of LOW FLOW, LOW SUCTION, SEAL POT LOW until the pump finally ate itself. Root cause wasn’t exotic. Valve proving was disabled for flexibility, min-flow bypass cracked shut, and we let a chattery transmitter spam the HMI. Well, there’s your problem.We ran a one-day cleanup: added time delays and hysteresis on noisy PVs, moved FYI items to advisories, latched true trips, and put starts behind hard permissives: suction > X, min-flow proved open, seal pot > Y. Also se...
As a specialty chemicals plant feeding downstream petrochem customers, we’ve spent the last year tightening up our Class I drum and tote packaging. The true constraint wasn’t nozzle speed. It was foaming, temperature-driven density swings, and sloppy changeovers that created leaks and rework.Three changes gave us the biggest lift: swapping to Coriolis mass-based fills with simple backpressure control to stabilize against vapor, switching from AODD to VFD-driven gear pumps to kill pulsation, and...
We tied 1.6 MW of rooftop PV and a small BESS into an old manufacturing plant. Day one, the HMI turned into a Christmas tree. Cooling water and compressor VFDs started throwing DC bus under or overvoltage and ground fault alarms whenever clouds rolled through or the BESS switched modes. Well, there’s your problem: nobody budgeted for power quality in a brownfield.Fix list: line reactors and DC chokes on the sensitive drives, proper bonding and a clean ground bar, notch filters for harmonics, and...
In our lab, the sequencers are rarely the constraint. The slowest pieces are the handoffs between steps: tube thaw, decap, barcode scan, plate transport, tip changes, and the wait for a robot to be ready. When I value stream map from accessioning to data delivery, a surprising amount of time is idle or rework caused by tiny mismatches in labware, timing, or data sync.Over the past year we got more mileage from boring fixes than from any new instrument. We standardized plate height and seal type,...
Air Liquide will build, own and operate two new production units in Indiana to deliver ultra-pure gases to the first U.S. semiconductor fab of SK hynix
Yara International ASA (Oslo, Norway) announced that its U.S. subsidiary, Yara North America, Inc., has reached an agreement to acquire Gulf Coast
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