Process Plant Noise Control at the Design Engineering Stage

1970 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 779-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
James G. Seebold

Effective noise control actions have to be taken in the preliminary definition and engineering design stages of major capital projects. Government legislation and public sentiment have virtually eliminated “wait-and-see” as a viable alternative. Unfortunately, an adequate understanding of the design aspects of noise control in process plants currently exists neither for all important noise sources nor among all suppliers, contractors, and users. This paper discusses both solutions and problems in sections dealing with sound transmission outdoors, plant sound power, furnaces, air coolers, control valves, rotating machinery, piping systems, flares, correction versus design, specifications and guarantees. The contention is that, where it is lacking, an adequate understanding of noise generation can be achieved, leading to the design of plants that are adequately quiet from the start.

1982 ◽  
Vol 196 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
J B Erskine

The design of process plant must incorporate noise control since retro-fitting is impractical on both technical and economic grounds. Whilst the method of approach depends on particular circumstances, key factors common to all projects are: setting of realistic specifications; establishing working procedures which ensure full co-operation by all members of the design team; early identification of the most difficult problems so that the most economic solutions can be generated; utilization of good and bad experience from previous projects to minimize noise control costs, this forms the basic work load in most projects; evaluation of the completed plant so that the degrees of success can be determined and lessons can be learned for future projects. These, and some technical aspects, are covered in the paper and whilst they are based on experience with large process plants they are equally applicable to smaller plants. The need for ‘in house’ knowhow is essential to the whole exercise since the noise sources are a function of the process and much of the data is of an empirical and practical nature.


1972 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 746-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pritchard H. White ◽  
Roger J. Sawley

The piping in a process plant acts as a distribution and radiation system throughout the plant for many significant sources of noise and vibration such as compressors, pumps, valves and other flow discontinuities, and the like. The acoustical and vibrational energy carried by the piping can result in the establishment of undesirable acoustic fields. This paper looks at those factors which are important to the proper description of the energy interaction and propagation in the fluid-filled piping system and discusses their significance in achieving noise control.


Author(s):  
Itsuro Hayashi ◽  
Teruo Hioki ◽  
Hiroshi Isobe

Piping systems for steam or gases with a pressure reducing device can cause acoustically induced vibration, resulting in material fatigue failure in process plant. Numerical investigation using sound-structure interaction analysis has been done to find the possible solution to reduce the dynamic stress level in the piping structure. The result shows that reinforcing of the pipe structure such as use of circumferential stiffener rings change the structural characteristic and the maximum stress in the pipe wall. Structural natural frequency is applied to evaluate both effectiveness of reinforcement of pipe structure and the effectiveness of the increase of pipe wall thickness.


1989 ◽  
Vol 111 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Silcox ◽  
H. C. Lester ◽  
S. B. Abler

This paper examines the physical mechanisms governing the use of active noise control in an extended volume of a cylindrical shell. Measured data were compared with computed results from a previously derived analytical model based on infinite shell theory. For both the analytical model and experiment, the radiation of external monopoles is coupled to the internal acoustic field through the radial displacement of the thin, elastic, cylindrical shell. An active noise control system was implemented inside the cylinder using a fixed array of discrete monopole sources, all of which lie in the plane of the exterior noise sources. Good agreement between measurement and prediction was obtained for both internal pressure response and overall noise reduction. Attenuations in the source plane greater than 15 dB were recorded along with a uniformly quieted noise environment over an indicative length inside the experimental model. Results indicate that for forced responses with extended axial distributions, axial arrays of control sources may be required. Finally, the Nyquist criteria for the number of azimuthal control sources is shown to provide for effective control over the full cylinder cross section.


Author(s):  
Jae-Young Choi ◽  
Sang-Hoon Byeon

Safety showers and eyewash stations are equipment used for primary washing if their operator is exposed to hazardous chemicals. Therefore, safety showers and eyewash stations should be installed to ensure operator safety in process plants with excessive hazardous chemicals. International guidelines related to safety showers and eyewash stations are introduced in ANSI Z358.1, BS EN 15154, and German DIN 12899-3:2009, but only mechanical specifications regarding safety showers and eyewash stations are suggested. As such, there are currently no engineering guidelines, books, or technical journal papers requiring safety showers or eyewash stations and their efficient deployment. Thus, this study conducted risk assessment from an industrial hygiene perspective, suggesting which process equipment requires a safety shower and eyewash, including their economical and efficient deployment for operator safety. In industry, safety showers and eyewash stations are considered part of the process safety field; this study attempted to contribute to the safety improvement of operators by applying risk assessment of the industrial hygiene field. More studies are needed that contribute to operators’ safety by incorporating industrial hygiene fields for other process safety fields, including safety showers and eyewash stations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 6959
Author(s):  
Seppo Sierla ◽  
Lotta Sorsamäki ◽  
Mohammad Azangoo ◽  
Antti Villberg ◽  
Eemeli Hytönen ◽  
...  

Researchers have proposed various models for assessing design alternatives for process plant retrofits. Due to the considerable engineering effort involved, no such models exist for the great majority of brownfield process plants, which have been in operation for years or decades. This article proposes a semi-automatic methodology for generating a digital twin of a brownfield plant. The methodology consists of: (1) extracting information from piping and instrumentation diagrams, (2) converting the information to a graph format, (3) applying graph algorithms to preprocess the graph, (4) generating a simulation model from the graph, (5) performing manual expert editing of the generated model, (6) configuring the calculations done by simulation model elements and (7) parameterizing the simulation model according to recent process measurements in order to obtain a digital twin. Since previous work exists for steps (1–2), this article focuses on defining the methodology for (3–5) and demonstrating it on a laboratory process. A discussion is provided for (6–7). The result of the case study was that only few manual edits needed to be made to the automatically generated simulation model. The paper is concluded with an assessment of open issues and topics of further research for this 7-step methodology.


Entropy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarita Greyling ◽  
Henri Marais ◽  
George van Schoor ◽  
Kenneth Richard Uren

Fault detection and isolation (FDI) within the petrochemical industries (PCIs) is largely dominated by statistical techniques. Although a signal-based technique centered on exergy flows within a process plant was proposed, it has only been applied to single process units. The exergy-based scheme has not yet been applied to process plants that feature at least a single recycle stream. The Tennessee Eastman process (TEP) is commonly used as an FDI benchmark process, but due to obfuscation, the TEP cannot be directly implemented in a commercial process simulator. Thus, application of FDI techniques to proprietary processes will require significant investment into the implementation of the FDI scheme. This is a key impediment to the wide-spread comparison of various FDI techniques to non-benchmark processes. In this paper, a gas-to-liquids (GTL) process model is developed in Aspen HYSYS®, and the model’s performance is validated. The exergy-based FDI technique is applied to the GTL process while the process is subjected to carefully selected faults. The selected faults aim to affect several process units, and specifically, the resultant recycle stream of the GTL process is considered. The results indicate that even though the exergy-based technique makes use of fixed thresholds, complete detection and isolation can be achieved for a list of common process faults. This is significant since it shows, for the first time, that the exergy-based FDI scheme can successfully be deployed in processes with recycle streams.


2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 423-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tian-Syung Lan ◽  
Min-Chie Chiu

Noise control is important and essential in a manufacturing factory, where the noise level is restricted by the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Several researches on new techniques of single noise control have been well addressed and developed; however, the study of noise depression on the whole plant noise by using optimum allocation planning is hardly found. An improper machine allocation will not only result in the tremendous cost on noise control task, but also cause the harmful environment for the neighborhood; therefore, the approach of optimum and economic allocation of noise sources within a constrained plant area becomes crucial and obligatory. In this paper, a novel technique of simulated annealing (SA) is applied in the numerical optimization, and the multi-noise plant with various sound monitoring systems is also introduced. Before optimization, the single noise is tested and compared with the simulated data from SoundPlan, a commercial sound simulation package, for the accuracy check of the mathematical model. The result reveals to be within good agreements. The proposed SA optimization on the allocation of multi-noise plant surely provides an economic and effective methodology in reducing the sound accumulation around the plant boundary.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 2291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenta Iwai ◽  
Satoru Hase ◽  
Yoshinobu Kajikawa

In this paper, we propose a multichannel active noise control (ANC) system with an optimal reference microphone selector based on the time difference of arrival (TDOA). A multichannel feedforward ANC system using upstream reference signals can reduce various noises such as broadband noise by arranging reference microphones close to noise sources. However, the noise reduction performance of an ANC system degrades when the noise environment changes, such as the arrival direction. This is because some reference microphones do not satisfy the causality constraint that the unwanted noise propagates to the control point faster than the anti-noise used to cancel the unwanted noise. To solve this problem, we propose a multichannel ANC system with an optimal reference microphone selector. This selector chooses the reference microphones that satisfy the causality constraint based on the TDOA. Some experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can choose the optimal reference microphones and effectively reduce unwanted acoustic noise.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 6152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Pasman ◽  
Kedar Kottawar ◽  
Prerna Jain

Resilience is the ability to restore performance after sustaining serious damage by a usually unexpected threat. This paper analyzes resilience of process plants as there are oil and gas refining, chemical manufacturing, power-producing plants, and many more. Over the years, plant safety has shifted from retrospective to proactive measures. Safety is important from many points of view, such as protection of workforce and nearby population, but certainly too from an economical and sustainability aspect. Pro-action requires predictive insight of what in the process can go wrong because of internal or external disruptive disturbance. Over the years, to that end, much effort was spent developing risk assessment methods and management. However, risk assessment has proven to be fallible because of various uncertainties and not the least by overlooked or unknown threats. To protect against those upsetting threats, measures can be taken up to a certain limit. These start in designing error-tolerant equipment able to be receptive to early warning signals during operations, responding to those with ‘plasticity’ of mind (that is, an organization and its leadership especially able to think ‘outside-the box’ for coping with unexpected situations), and finally, to deploy effective emergency response and able to recover from damage quickly. The paper presents a summary/review of nearly a decade of research work at the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at the Texas A&M University to develop the concept and the techniques to realize a resilient plant, so far with a focus on chemical plant. It is, however, still a ‘work-in-progress’; potential is large. Besides the conceptual details, cases are presented that show how human and technical factors, combined in a socio-technical system, can lead to a broader plant safety insight enabling more effective risk control and increased resilience. These cases have up to now only considered warning signals and possible management action, while still limited to internal threats. Hence, aspects of equipment design and recovery should be further considered, also in the light of the dynamics of present-day business environment.


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