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Journal of Industrial and Environmental Chemistry | Volume 2
December 06 -07, 2018 | Dubai, UAE
Pet roleum Engineer ing, Oil and Gas
International Conference on
Joint Event
Notes:
I
ndustrial Gas flares are used world-wide to reduce safety
concerns in up-steam and down-stream production of
hydrocarbon products. Flares are classified as non-assisted
utility flares, steam-assisted flares, air-assisted flares,
pressure-assisted flares, enclosed flares, liquid flares or pit
flares. Efficient flare design must allow operation at very low
hydrocarbon flow rates (purge conditions) to save fuel cost and
very high hydrocarbon flow rates (maximum flow conditions)
for plant safety. Flare must also maintain high destruction
efficiency under highly variable wind and rain conditions and
must safely burn non-combustible flare gas as well as highly
flammable flare gas. Hydrocarbon plants generally employee a
“Flare Minimization Plan” as part of their air permit to reduce
their environmental impact. Plants that “routinely” flare gas
also utilize flare gas recovery units to improve plant efficiency
and reduce environmental impact. To ensure safe operation,
flare stacks are typically designed toburn flammable gases high
enough to limit thermal radiation flux levels to surrounding
equipment and work areas and to minimize ground level
concentrations of hazardous CO and VOC emissions. Various
monitors are routinely used to quantify flare performance
in terms of thermal radiation flux, flare gas flow rate and
flare gas composition as well as ground level concentrations
of hazardous emissions. Initial work aimed at characterizing
flare combustion efficiency was limited to small single point
elevated flares using a hood suspended from a crane to
capture the flare plume from which samples were extracted
and analysed. More recent work has employed ground based
optical techniques suchasDifferential AbsorptionLIDAR (DIAL),
Open-Path fourier transform Infra-Red Spectroscopy (OPFTIR),
passive FTIR (PFTIR) and video Imaging spectro-radiometry
(VISR). Performance data collected using ground based optical
techniques are limited by wind and rain conditions given the
impact on the temporal and spatial variation of flare plumes
from an elevated flare. Time averaged results from ground
based optical instruments fail to capture the dynamic nature
of flare operation under varying ambient conditions. Also,
current ground based optical methods are not suitable for
application to multi-Point Ground Flares (MPGF) due to the
flare field size and number of flare tips in the flare field and the
associated complexity of the optical sampling requirements.
Elevated Analytics has developed advanced mobile flare
monitoring systems based on fast acting sensors mounted
on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to directly measure local
emissions in flare plumes. Measured data is transmitted
wirelessly from the mobile platform(s) to the ground then
stored and made available on cloud-based storage and retrieval
systems. Real-time spatially and temporally accurate data
is used to generate “time-varying” contour plots of local air
quality to provide early warning of hazardous conditions during
plant operations. This fast-response data can be linked directly
to the plant’s Digital Control System (DCS) to allow the plant
to operate at maximum capacity (and profit) while minimizing
environmental impact.
Speaker Biography
Joseph D Smith was trained at the Advanced Combustion Engineering Research Centre
and received his Ph.D in chemical engineering from Brigham Young University in 1990.
He has held the wayne and gayle laufer endowed energy chair at Missouri University
of Science and Technology since 2011. He co-founded elevated analytic to focus on
advanced sensor technology to monitor and control flare emissions. Previously, he
led the John zink flare development group, has consulted for zeeco on advanced multi-
point ground flare design, and serves as an expert witness for flare performance. He
and his colleagues published over 80 papers (20 related to flare design) and currently
holds 12 patents (eight related to flare technology). He has contributed chapters to the
John zink combustion handbook, the industrial burner handbook, and most recently to
Perry’s Chemical Engineers’ handbook and the encyclopedia of chemical technology.
e:
smithjose@mst.eduJoseph D Smith
Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA
Direct real-time measurement of industrial gas flare emissions
Joseph D Smith, Oil & Gas 2018 &
Petroleum Engineering 2018, Volume 2
DOI: 10.4066/2591-7331-C2-004