(78e) Tutorial on Adsorption Unit Troubleshooting

The cracked gas driers are a reliable unit operation in the ethylene plant. Because issues with adsorption units are rare, the process engineer may not be able rely on past experiences to detect these issues early on or may not know what corrective action should be taken to mitigate the issue. This tutorial will introduce you to the art of trouble shooting your adsorption unit. Honeywell UOP, is not only the largest adsorbent producer worldwide, but also has decades of experience in the petrochemical industry serving a wide variety of customers. This allows UOP engineers to come across many of these uncommon issues. Grouping all these issues allowed to develop a certain troubleshooting approach. During this tutorial, we will look at a couple of these groups: bed support failures, analyzer anomalies and liquid carry over. In troubleshooting an adsorption unit, it is also important to analyze the unit’s performance, this is done with a software solution, UOP ARMGuard™ System (ARM - Adsorbent Remote Monitoring). Increasing your knowledge of the adsorption unit, using a software tool to analyze your unit’s performance, and working together with adsorbent experts will increase the speed at which a resolution can be found to an adsorbent issue and potentially avoid a multimillion-dollar emergency shut-down.