Pressure Monitoring of Reactor Bundles in a Refinery - Sponsored Whitepaper

Intelligent Data Logging Systems from dataTaker CHESTERLAND OH—June 12, 2012

Lately CAS DataLoggers provided the datalogging equipment to an oil refinery conducting a demanding field logging test application. The refinery used large catalytic reaction tubes for processing: each tube in turn contained hundreds of smaller tubes. These reactor bundles flowed liquid through one end of the reaction tube and crude oil through the other end. The tubes had to be periodically inspected for leaks, so workers inserted fitted plugs equipped with pressure sensors, and the tubes were then air-pressurized. When the pressure in the tubes stabilized after a few minutes, technicians had to work quickly to identify any leaks in the roughly one thousand tubes inside each reactor bundle, and on average it might take personnel a minute or two to test each one. Meanwhile the reactor had to go offline while workers fixed or replaced its bundles, so the refinery lost time and money for every minute of these maintenance sessions. Accordingly, supervisors began looking for an automated monitoring system which could allow users to quickly flag the tube identification numbers and view all the pressure data by just touching their corresponding numbers onscreen.