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Show -3- deferring maintenance, downsizing their maintenance staffs, and outsourcing maintenance, repair and retrofit responsibilities. Refineries and chemical plants are inherently dangerous places to work. Hundred of miles of piping transport volatile, toxic and carcinogenic liquids and gases under intense heat and pressure. Pumps and valves fail. Pipes corrode. And refractory-lined flare tips require frequent repair and replacement. Problems with sophisticated electronics can, for example, put an entire plant atrisk. Recently, a pair of computers in a Texas refinery stopped communicating with each other for 15 seconds. That brief lapse in communications and control caused more than 66,000 gallons of naphtha to spew from several damaged pipe connections. A giant vapor cloud of naphtha, a highly volatile petroleum distillate, floating above a refinery is very dangerous. (Naphtha is so explosive it can be ignited by sparks from the distributor of a passing car.) Skilled refinery employees acted quickly, shutting down and bypassing damaged pipelines. The vapor cloud dissipated. The dangerous situation was over within 15 minutes. If the naphtha had been ignited, the explosion would have leveled the refinery unit and ruptured nearby acid-gas lines containing hydrogen sulfide, H2S, which can kill many people in extremely small doses. Knowledgeable refinery managers, who may be forced by corporate decisions to defer maintenance, realize they cannot cut any corners in the maintenance, repair and replacement of flare pilots and burner tips. They are also acutely aware of the four essential requirements for elevated flares: 1. Safe, reliable operation 2. Dependable ignition 3. No air penetration into flare tips, seals and stacks/headers 4. No shortcuts in design and construction to ISO-9001 quality standards Refractory-Free Fluidic Flare™ Tips State-of-art elevated flares utilize a lightweight Fluidic SeaI™, a patented mUlticone device with no moving parts, that is built into the refractory-free alloy tip of a Fluidic Flare™ burner to provide a straight-thru, wall-less venturi flow path for waste gases in only one direction. This ensures maximum exit velocities for better control of flare flame patterns. |