Background
The Jamnagar Refinery is a private sector crude oil refinery owned by Reliance Industries Limited in Jamnagar, Gujarat, India. The refinery was commissioned on 14 July, 1999 with an installed capacity of 668,000 barrels per day (106,200 m3/d). It is currently the largest refinery in the world.
Problems
Every oil refinery has furnaces. During the campaign life of the furnace, there are occasions when the furnace is shutdown for short periods to perform various maintenance activities. At Jamanagar Refinery, when the maintenance activity for the furnace was scheduled, there were 2 challenges:
- The furnace was too hot to start the workmen entry in the furnace to perform the maintenance activity. In a normal circumstance it takes a long time for the furnace to cool from its high temperature to ambient temperature. In order to achieve the production target, it was imperative to reduce the shutdown time of the furnace.
- The environment inside the furnace was too hot, humid and harmful for workers to carry out maintenance jobs.
Our Solution
When the furnace was shutdown, its temperature was 1200°C. Initially, steaming was done to bringing down the temperature from 1200°C to 150°C. TDS job was to bring down the temperature of furnace from 150°C to ambient temperature in fastest possible way.
TDS Airgineers installed Desiccant type Dehumidifier along with Condensing unit, Blower & Exhausted Blower. TDS provided DMS 3000 (02 Nos.), TDS 6.5 (06 Nos.), TDS B-5 (04 Nos.), TDS B-10 (02 Nos.). It delivered a flow of cool and dry air (12000 cfm) inside the furnace from the inspection door. The conditioned air created a positive pressure inside the furnace and removed the contaminated air, bringing fresh, dry and cool air in the furnace. Simultaneously, Blowers were exhausting the hot, humid and harmful air from the furnace. With this effort, the temperature of the furnace was brought down to ambient level at a faster rate, in comparison to natural cooling. Within 24 hours we achieved the desired ambient temperature which enabled the workers to start the maintenance jobs swiftly in a healthy environment.
Benefits
- Client saved 1.5 days of productive time
- Reduction of shutdown time was equal to tangible cost benefit
- Efficiency of the workers increase. Thus, maintenance work was finished before time.
