As previously stated, plant designers and operations of sulphuric acid plants around the world are facing challenges associated with the recent industry trends; primarily rising energy costs, rising competition and rising demand for sulphuric acid.
All the key components in the acid plant have to adapt to these developments and support the plant designers and customers with suitable solutions.
One of the biggest components that can have the biggest impact is the main blower package. Due to their high reliability and availability, the main blowers are used in an un-spared single blower arrangement which combines simple installation with easy operation and requires low investment costs.
With the increased pressure to expand production capacity; blower suppliers have been successful in improving the maximum flow per frame size. In fact, since the 1970s, capacity has been increased by more than 43%, allowing the customer to reap the benefits associated with increased production.
With the increase in high flow capabilities, the main blower series in acid plants have exceeded the available single equipment size on the main blowers and some other key components including but not limited to boilers, diluters, heat-exchangers, and pumps.
As a result, plants have overcome this design dilemma by either using a single train arrangement wherever technically feasible or using a dual arrangement of two 50% components in parallel for all cases where the components exceed the available single equipment size. (figure 1)