confined spaces safety
Petrochemical companies have a great deal of attention for confined spaces safety. They treat confined space safety and confined space entry with the utmost care and attention, this due to the amount of confined spaces equipment that are present in their production plants, confined spaces are not only drums, towers, tanks and reactors, also ditches with a depth of more than 1,5 meter.
confined spaces entry
The petrochemical companies have a confined space procedure for entering and the specific type of work/ inspection that need to be done to avoid confined space incidents or in worse case confined space deaths. The priority is to avoid the need to enter a confined space especially during catalyst change out works, because with catalyst works the risks are higher due to pyrophoric catalyst (inert entry), hazards of flammable concentrations. The definition of a flammable concentration, the concentration (%) of a gas and or a vapor capable of producing a fire or flash in presence of an ignition source. At low level of oxygen, the concentrations of flammable components and oxygen can be between the Lower Explosive Limit (LFL) and the Upper Explosive or Flammable Limit (UFL).
confined spaces
From safety perspective a concentration of these components is never constant or resistant to change, talking about vapors and gases it is easy to understand why. There is a natural convection, for example, or external factors that may alter/ increase concentration of air significantly, there for creating flammable atmosphere in an confined space where vapors are dispersed in concentrations above UFL. This is a situation you have when opening reactors expansion of gas that was way above its UFL into atmosphere, creating a flammable mixture. It is just 1 step between non-flammable and flammable mix.
confined spaces equipment
The instability of concentrations is why all safety procedures ordain percentages of LFL (and not 95percent LFL) as the max. concentration for vessel entry, catalyst works. Our goal is to minimalize confined space entries, using modern innovations.
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non entry unloading reactors
The reactor catalyst unloading is in general underestimated. It’s an important part of the catalyst-changeout. During the process inside the reactor there are happening a lot of things such as, prefer process flow, hot spots, build up cokes, unexpected contamination from de feed that has impact on the lifetime of the catalyst. With the presence of an experienced catalyst consultant with adequate field experience none of this information will be lost. Already at the start of the project preparation this expertise will help to make a reactor catalyst unloading procedure to make sure that no information will be lost at the beginning of the catalyst changeout.