Risk Mitigation

LOCATION: Canada

Refinery Oil Filtration

Client Objective

Increased capacity at an oil and gas plant resulted in a new bottleneck challenge. Higher carryover of fine solids from upstream unit operations were exceeding tolerable limits for downstream processes. Equipment suppliers recommended the installation of a filtration system that had success in similar plants. To derisk the large capital investment to implement the new system, the plant operator enlisted AGEIAS’ help to prove that the proposed system would be successful for their application.

The AGEIAS Approach

For this project, AGEIAS faced several challenges:

Only 20L of process fluid from the plant was available for testing, limiting the scope and scale of testing with it
The process fluid is both toxic and flammable and the proposed filtration would be conducted at elevated temperatures
The client’s plant needed to make a go/no-go decision on the proposed supplier package in 4 – 6 weeks

The team at AGEIAS overcame these challenges by developing a safe fluid analog and scaled down cold flow filter set up to develop an experimental plan. Filtration performance depends not only on multiple factors (fluid and solids properties and interaction affinities; filter media and loading) but it also depends on each of these factors to different extents in different circumstances. Even if the process is similar, what works at one facility may not work at another. Keeping this distinction in mind, AGEIAS used dimensionless scaling and matched physical properties of their client’s operation to design and build a test set up and analog to ensure results would be representative at scale under real conditions.

This approach makes it much easier and less expensive to uncover problems and generate useful data quickly. It also substantially reduces the safety consequences during testing. For example, if the analogue system leaks, the material released may be benign rather than a hazardous or flammable process material. These considerations also accelerate testing and data generation.

To validate conclusions and serve as a tie-point to translate experimental results with the analog to the real process, a final test was conducted. The available process fluid was tested under plant operating conditions with a smaller scaled down filter setup. This test was quickly set up and executed by using AGEIAS’ in-house infrastructure and equipment inventory for flammable high temperature testing.

Customer Value

AGEIAS’ client was able to confirm that the proposed filtration system would not work for this new process fluid within the deadline, saving them millions in capital expenditures and other resources.

Faced with challenging constraints with testing on actual material, AGEIAS intelligently developed an analogue that behaved similarly enough to generate representative data to fast track experimental work. This allowed their team to test the system, identify potential issues and gather the information needed to make an informed go/no-go decision before committing to the full-scale system.

Capabilities Demonstrated

Dimensionless Scaling & Analogue Development
Filtration Science & Process Engineering
Experimental Design & Rapid Deployment
Hot Hydrocarbon Handling & Hazardous-Material Testing
Industrial Troubleshooting & Capital Risk Reduction
Scale down modelling of large industrial equipments

How We Help You:

Process and production plant operators face many challenges and often make expensive decisions quickly with limited data. AGEIAS’ expertise allows us to design experimental tests at manageable scales that can be executed quickly with still providing results representative at scale. AGEIAS’ clients can learn, iterate, and make better-informed scale-up decisions before putting significant capital, scarce materials or higher-risk infrastructure at stake.