In chemical plants, oil refineries and steel mills wet gas scrubbers play a significant role in preventing pollutants being released to the atmosphere. However, use of inappropriate analytical sensors compromises their efficiency potentially leading to breaches in regulations and damage to the environment. In a new white paper, Mettler Toledo explains the importance of choosing the correct sensors in scrubber applications.
Many chemical and petrochemical processes produce gaseous emissions that contain polluting substances, such as sulphur dioxide and hydrogen chloride. If released into the atmosphere, these compounds would violate regulations and cause serious environmental damage as both are components of acid rain. They also may lead to corrosion and scaling of plant equipment and costly maintenance.
Units called wet gas scrubbers are used to remove these compounds. The principle of wet gas scrubbing is to bring the polluted gas into contact with a solution that contains reagents that absorb or "scrub" the unwanted compounds from the gas. This creates cleaner emissions that can be safely released.
Wet gas scrubbers are usually supplied with analytical sensors already in place. But sometimes the sensors are not robust enough to operate reliably in the harsh gas-scrubber environment. Regular sensor replacement in order to maintain an accurate measurement can be very inconvenient, but this is a less severe problem than those caused by false readings from sensors.
An erroneous measurement could result in gas not being sufficiently cleaned, meaning pollutants are being released and regulations breached. Alternatively, unnecessary amounts of costly reagents might be being used. The white paper "You're Scrubbing, but Are You Clean?" discusses the above issues and outlines analytical sensor technology called intelligent sensor management can increase scrubber efficiency and reduce scrubber operating costs.
