Solutions Ahead Blog

Upon first glance, a gasket may appear to be an inconsequential part in a robust reactor system, but the job of this component is critical to the successful operation of your vessel.  The role of a gasket is to create a tight seal between two components to prevent the unwanted emission of liquid or gas.  Failure to do so can be catastrophic to your operation!

The extreme temperatures and pressures under which glass-lined vessels often operate make it imperative that you select the right kind of gasket to withstand the specifications of your process.  

Since compression is required to maintain the seal, gaskets are typically made with a malleable material, such as PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene).  A supple material like this is able to more effectively create a seal between the harder surfaces of the components it is placed between than a gasket made from rigid material, such as stainless steel. 

If you didn’t catch last week’s post, we talked about the importance of preventative maintenance with regards to glass-lined equipment and discussed some recommendations for inspecting the interior of your vessel. This week we’ll concentrate on the exterior of the vessel and the types of procedures you can do to ensure your equipment is in good shape and operating efficiently as well as look for potential issues.

Glass-lined equipment in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries is the workhorse in the process. You would expect such a critical piece of equipment would receive the top level of care, but this is often not the case. In the past, preventative maintenance, or "PM", was virtually nonexistent; in fact, it was common practice for the equipment to run until failure (The horror! The horror!). Over the last ten years there have been an increase in Reliability Engineers coming onboard to take a more proactive approach to glass-lined equipment and help it run with less downtime (i.e. taking the time to service the ongoing maintenance needs of the equipment in an efficient way). Most companies can find themselves somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. While you may not have the budget to hire a reliability engineer who can focus specifically on managing the lifecycle of your equipment, most plant managers have enough sense to follow equipment guidelines and put best practices into place when operating and maintaining an expensive piece of equipment.

Halloween may be over, but we still thought it would be a good time to ressurrect an old post of ours about reglassing, especially since we recently published a new Introduction to Reglassing brochure.  It's a great resource to learn more about the subject and how it can help bring new life to your old, used, or damaged glass-lined steel equipment.  

This post has been updated from it's original format and republished on our blog.  

Testing equipment is a wise and practical thing to do before fully investing in any technology that's new to your process.  Regardless of whether your application and product are conventional or unique, you still want to have some sort of assurity that it's not going to totally fail once your system is installed and put into operation.  

To successfully convey solids, there are a number of factors that need to be considered.  This includes transfer rate, transfer distance, product characteristics, quantity, and level of containment required (just to name a few).   Given the range of issues involved, it’s easy to see why there is no single solution that will apply to all applications.  And while each one is important in its own right, the quantity of material involved can be especially important when considering all the options available.   

If you are reading this post, chances are you have a valuable product in that is being processed in a specialized system.  When your company has made a significant expenditure on equipment, it’s only natural to want to ensure it is correctly operated and well maintained.  Just as “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link”, a valve is essentially a link in the system’s “chain”.  You can have a top-of-the-line vessel but if the other parts that make up the system are subpar, it will jeopardize the integrity of your entire process.

 Product recovery is an old concept, yet it is still relevant to many industrial operations.  Inevitably there will be some level of wastage in a process, that’s to be expected; but in many cases the amount of waste and/or the value of the product makes recovery a viable option to consider.  The market is constantly changing, bringing forth innovative, new solutions and improvements to existing equipment that you can utilize to recover more product, adjust to higher purity requirements, and potentially reduce energy consumption. Here are the top 5 reasons why you should consider recovering your product:

Cleanliness and safety in the workplace are crucial in pharmaceutical, fine chemical, food, and other processes that involve transferring powder from one place to another.  Any time materials need to be moved it brings up potential housekeeping issues and risks to the operators. But how does one manage to maintain sanitary work conditions to uphold the integrity of their product while maximizing operator ergonomics and minimizing negative influences on the environment (while factoring in productivity, cost, etc.)?  That’s a lot of objectives to juggle all at once, especially when the best solution for one problem isn’t always the best for another aspect of the application.  Fortunately, cleanliness and safety go hand in hand, as a hygienic atmosphere contributes to a safe working environment for employees. 

If your reactor isn’t operating at the productivity rate it used to, there are a number of reasons that could be causing this.  It depends on the symptoms, but usually one of the first items you should look at is the mixing system.  After all, agitation is a primary part of the reaction process and it is one of the technologies that can be tweaked or upgraded to help optimize the performance of the entire operation.