Heating cooling circulators- Part 2
This is Part 2 of our blog post on heating cooling circulators. Refer to the earlier blog post for more details. Heating Cooling Circulators Part 1
- Safety Features: Especially for chemical industry use cases, a failed heating cooling circulatory is not merely an annoyance or inefficiency but can be a very critical safety hazard. You are not worried just about a damaged product but potential damage to life and property. It is crucial that you invest in a high-reliability system with a long Mean Time between failures. Of course, a good HAZOP will provide additional lines of defense but it is a bad idea to compensate using interlocks for an inherently cheap and faulty cooling system. Some points to consider are hooking up your cooling circulator directly to process interlocks so that alarms can be triggered and the system can execute a graceful shutdown in the unlikely event that cooling capacity is lost. This is even more crucial for larger pilot plant setups. E.g. An example P&ID is shown below
- Energy Efficiency: This was a rare discussion ten years ago but with the increasing concern about ESG and sustainability customers are increasingly concerned about the insulation and heat losses from the circulators. Apart from motors, the heating cooling circulator is often the energy hog in a pilot plant setup and a efficient design will also save you Operating expenses in terms of electric bills.
- Aesthetics: Very often a heating cooling circulator is a large piece of equipment sitting center stage in the lab and every visitor to the lab over years often this is the first piece of equipment they notice. Customers often rate a system on how well it looks (or does not!). In the past, the outlook was that so long as the system performed its job, one didn’t care how it looked. It is no longer the case! In a modern R&D lab a heating cooling circulator needs to incorporate good industrial design, ergonomics and aesthetics.
- Coupling and hook up arrangements: In many settings a heating / cooling circulator must be frequently coupled and decoupled from the process equipment that it services. For this it is essential that a good coupling type be designed. The needs are fast coupling / decoupling combined with a leak proof design and the ability to resist hundreds or thousands of such cycles without damage. Furthermore a good coupling has the smallest loss of pressure as well as is idiot proof to prevent damage even under rough handling. These are indeed high demands and real R&D experience shows which models and designs withstand these requirements.
- Pricing: Heating Cooling circulators are not cheap. On smaller projects they can be as expensive as the rest of the reactor system. This is a major pain point for customers in these days of tight budgets. This needs thinking outside the box and exploring new vendors outside of the traditional legacy manufacturers. Indeed we find that there are significant opportunities for saving when the procurement team is willing to put in the extra effort to try and approve new vendors. Of course, chemicals is a safety critical industry and every new vendor must be carefully vetted and scrutinized. But on the other hand, not being open to new, more cost competitive options just means your competitive advantage is lost over time.
- ATEX Areas: Careful design review needs to be undertaken for R&D projects involving ATEX areas. Often a non-ATEX system located remotely may be cheaper but the piping pressure drops must be carefully considered. In other cases specifying an ATEX system is the only option. In many cases an ATEX electric heater may be a more expensive or less safe option and customers should review replacing it by a fluid based Heating / Cooling Circulator system
- Hot Spot Problems for sensitive chemicals and reactions: In many cases the chemical product can be heat sensitive or subject to a runaway reaction above certain temperature. In such cases it is prudent to avoid electric heating. It is very difficult to avoid hot spots with electric heaters and in certain fault scenarios very high Temperatures may be reached. In a heating cooling circulator (well designed) the temperature is naturally limited to the max temperature of the fluid. This combined with the lack of electric sparks and ignition leads to an inherently safe system. Oftentimes there is a trade-off between heat transfer requirements and safety i.e. to prevent hot spots one may choose a circulating fluid with a lower T (for a reactor heating duty) and compensate the lower delta T by providing more heat transfer area.
We hope that this two-part blog series on Heating Cooling Circulators has given our readers more perspective on selecting a good system for their applications.
Meanwhile do reach out to our experts at Amar [email protected] for selecting the next system for your projects.