MOL Petrochemicals is the largest chemical company and sole polyolefins producer in Hungary, and accounts for 20 percent of the petrochemical capacity in central eastern Europe. With such an important role meeting the region’s demand for petrochemical products, MOL’s Tiszaújváros facility is continuously in search of ways to improve the availability and performance of critical process units.
According to MOL engineers Tibor Poór and István Bognár, the company recently completed a series of successful projects designed to eliminate operational and maintenance issues that were impacting some of the Stream Cracker plant’s main turbocompressor units, its heat transfer systems, and several manometers and diagnostic transmitters used to monitor key pumps and corrosion throughout the complex.
The bottlenecks that had developed on the steam lines were creating a number of issues that were impacting the plant’s margins. Poór and Bognár were seeing slowdowns on eight of their units as a result of pump cavitation and wear on rotating equipment, all of which had to be addressed with unplanned maintenance calls. They needed a way to detect pump cavitation that would remove the process uncertainty that was affecting production throughout the rest of the facility.
To accomplish this, Poór and Bognár implemented a solution that took advantage of the capabilities of Emerson’s Rosemount™ 3051S wireless pressure transmitter. After diagnosing the situation with the 3051S, they realized that the data they were receiving was actually the process noise at the output of the pump.
By combining the 3051S with the Rosemount Series 848 wireless temperature transmitters, which they used to measure bearing temperature, and the predictive capabilities of Emerson’s AMS™ Device Manager, Poór and Bognár’s team was able to get a much clearer picture of pump health. This integrated solution has allowed them to address potential pump issues well before they impact production. It’s also expected to increase the efficiency of regular pump maintenance, which could save between $5,000 and $50,000 per pump.
Unplanned maintenance was also a problem affecting the plant’s heat exchangers. Biological corrosion introduced from the facility’s water treatment system was finding its way into the exchangers. This required plant operators to mix additives into the cooling water to control corrosion and pH, but difficulty controlling the exact dosage meant that corrosion continued to pose a challenge.
In order to take a more proactive approach, the plant installed Emerson’s Roxar™ CorrLog wireless corrosion monitoring transmitters at heat exchanger flow outlet points to provide real-time corrosion data that could be analyzed in the AMS platform. This made it possible for plant managers to streamline maintenance operations and improve the functionality of the heat transfer systems. At a replacement cost of $70,000 per heat exchanger, this could add up to substantial additional savings in the future.
Operator overload was the challenge that Poór and Bognár faced when it came to monitoring pressure on several of the facility’s pump compression packing supply systems. Existing procedure called for personnel to manually record the pressure shown on the manometers that provided pressure readouts according to a regular cyclical schedule, but this method was wasting valuable man-hours and often resulted in the supply lines losing pressure between manual checks.
The team decided to replace the manometers with Emerson’s Rosemount Wireless Pressure Gauges, which deliver continuous pressure data that can be interpreted in the AMS platform and the distributed control system to alert maintenance crews in advance of potential failures. As a result, MOL has reduced the number of field visits and unnecessary maintenance rounds, and the plant expects to save at least $10,000 for every pump breakdown that it’s able to avoid.