Maintenance

The maintenance of a chloride removal Vari-Zeo System from CLS Industrial Purification is the easiest and most cost-effective of any material available.

The maintenance of a chloride removal system warrants focus on three separate areas:

• Loading
• Online maintenance and troubleshooting
• Discharge

Loading

The loading of a system from CLS Industrial Purification is easy for any operations team to undertake. The shape of the material is designed to "lay" down in a systematic manner, allowing for dense loading without the use of a dense loader. Sock loading the material is sufficient to achieve a densely-loaded bed.

For larger treaters, CLS Industrial Purification has designed a sock-based pneumatic loading device to assist in achieving the proper loading. For customers who decide to utilize our systems on a longer term, we can provide a loading device free of charge for the refinery to keep. Each loading device is designed and fabricated to the specifications of the vessel for which it will be used.

Online Maintenance and Troubleshooting

Online maintenance of a Cl treater is minimal until an upset occurs. A reformer experiences upsets quite regularly, and depending on the cause of the upset, can affect the Cl treater and possibly render it inoperable. If a reformer is run with higher levels of NH3, any spike in Cls can promote the formation of NH3 salts on the Cl treater bed. This will create a gradually increasing pressure drop until channeling occurs, or until the pressure drop becomes too great and the bed must be bypassed. Normally this will necessitate a change-out and new material being installed. If a Vari-Zeo System from CLS Industrial Purification is installed, this problem can be mitigated through water washing. Our materials are manufactured to the highest degree of quality, allowing the user to water wash, diesel wash, or steam the material in order to clear the bed and return to normal operation.

Discharge

Discharging a bed can be painful and expensive for an operations or maintenance department. In the past, a Cl treater change-out could take two months or more. This results in a huge production loss if a shutdown is required, or can result in serious downstream fouling if the treater is bypassed for a certain length of time. The extremely lengthy change-outs were due to the need to use hot nitrogen to purge a bed until the proper LELs were achieved. This process alone would take anywhere from three weeks to three months, depending on the size of the bed and the age of the material. The cost of importing hot nitrogen onsite for this length of time can exceed the cost of the material itself.

When using the Vari-Zeo System from CLS Industrial Purification, the bed can be steamed at the time of discharge. The use of steam to purge will reduce purge times to two days, greatly reducing the cost and downstream effects of a change-out. Once the material has been purged and unloaded, the Vari-Zeo can be disposed of as normal industrial waste. Our material does NOT need to be declared hazardous.