Challenge

Timing is everything when it comes to a scheduled plant outage.  But sometimes even the best plans are derailed when a piece of water treatment equipment fails.  That's what happened at a Midwest refinery when its conventional clarification system broke down before the plant's scheduled shutdown.  The refinery had planned for one clarifier to be taken off-line for the outage, and for three temporary mobile clarification trailers from Siemens Water Technologies, formerly USFilter, to be installed and operational well before that time.  Two weeks before the outage was to begin, a meeting was scheduled to finalize the details of the trailer installation.  But before the meeting even happened, the customer informed Siemens that the conventional clarifier had failed and they needed the trailers sooner than planned to avoid costly production downtime.

Solution

The customer asked Siemens to provide mobile clarification on an emergency basis to treat the refinery's water while the facility repaired the conventional clarifier.  Within five days, three 1,000-gallons-per-minute (gpm) mobile clarification units were delivered, operational and making water that met the refinery's specification.  Combined, the three clarifiers delivered approximately 2,900 gpm of treated water for boiler feedwater and other uses.

Technical service and field support personnel from Siemens worked with the customer on this fast-track project, overcoming variable inlet water turbidity levels, and a less than ideal tie-in to the customer's existing system.  Siemens provided the installation manpower, as well as on-site operation support to ensure that the units were running in top condition and producing the desired results.

Results

The mobile clarification units remained on-site for six weeks, allowing the customer to repair its failed clarifier without having to shut down the plant before the normally scheduled outage.

The mobile clarifiers performed extremely well, even with the variable inlet water turbidity level.  The mobile clarification technology is ideal for this type of application, as it can handle high turbidity, as well as variable turbidity in the feedwater source.

Download Full Case Study