Greenfield Coke Plant Waste Heat Recovery System Alternatives Technical and Economic Evaluation, Process Design, Detail Design Management, and Startup

METALLURGICAL COKE PLANT DESIGN, INSTALLATION, AND STARTUP

Process Engineering Associates, LLC (PROCESS) was contracted by the client, a local engineering company, to play several key roles in the design, procurement, installation, and startup of a greenfield coke manufacturing facility for the ultimate client, a coke manufacturing company.  Primary project responsibilities included:

• Process design of the facility heat recovery system, designed to deliver a constant flow of high-pressure saturated steam to a near-by chemical company manufacturing facility
• Project engineering for the detail design of the entire manufacturing facility, including coordination of all detail design disciplines and ensuring that the integrity of all process design was maintained during detail design
• Assistance during equipment procurement including the development of vendor bid packages and the evaluation of vendor bids and vendor engineering documents
• On-site assistance as required during facility construction
• Execution of facility startup tasks including the development of facility operating procedures, operator training, and on-site startup assistance

Process design of the facility heat recovery system included the following tasks:

• Existing steam and condensate systems hydraulic study
• Subsystem alternatives technical screening and technical and economic evaluations
• Process design basis development
• Computer process simulation, and process flow diagrams (PFDs) and process descriptions preparation
• Process control system design, and piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) and process control descriptions preparation
• Detailed equipment specifications preparation
• Process design packages preparation and design reviews facilitation

PROCESS’ licensed commercial process simulation software was used during the steam and condensate hydraulic study to determine existing system bottlenecks, during the design basis task to bracket facility operation, for the development of the mass and energy balances that formed the basis of the PFDs, and in the design of the steam piping (using the software hydraulics package).  PROCESS’ licensed heat exchanger evaluation software was used to facilitate detail design of the steam condensers.

Due to the cyclical of the coke manufacturing process, development of a process design basis that truly bracketed facility operation was a special challenge during this project.  Likewise, since steam production varied and steam demand was constant, process control system design was difficult, encompassing controls to facilitate the condensing of excess steam as well as controls for augmenting steam production by utilizing natural gas injection.