D0 Collider Detector LINDE, East Chicago (LAr Contractor) Trip Report
East Chicago is capable of processing air at a 6-7E6 SCFH rate. They can produce as much as 1.2E6 SCFH 02 and 4.5 SCFH N2 (not coincidently) with a peak product efficiency of 85-86% (product to total Intake). The general area demand has been as high as 10E6, as low as 4.5E6, and is currently 8E6 SCFH totaI product. The plant is really four plants in one. At anyone time one or more plants can be down for maintenance and the others online and delivering to the pipe line that distributes their product to nearby steel plants, and to the liquid reservoirs (perlite insulated tanks) of 160, 160 and 200 E6 SCF. At the time of our visit two plants were down and two were on line. The following describes the characteristics of one of the four plants. The cycle requires a base compressor (Brown Boveri, 22,600 hp) that pumps to 90-100 psig, and a booster compressor (Clark, 14,000 hp) that pumps to 300 psig. Filter houses (ca. 20-ft x 20-ft) feed the suctions and the discharge is scrubbed by dual, molecular sieve, beds 0 300 psi (6-8 hour cycle time). The beds are provided with dust blow down and down stream filter provisions. The scrubbers remove CO2, the heavy HC, and water. The effectiveness of the scrubbers is measured by the record 6 years one of the plants ran w/o the need for thawing. The thaw operation takes about 4 days. It was interesting to learn that a plant can be brought on line in two and one half hours from a warm start. Major swings from N2 rich to O2 rich production take about an hour. Argon is a small constituent in air (0.61) and thus not a major product. It comes off the main column at 761 Ar balance air components and is further purified in another column to 2% N2, 2% O2. The stream is then warmed, H2 added, and run though a palladium deoxo to combine the O2 to water. The water is removed in a dryer and the product reliquified to seperate the nitrogen. The final product is either drawn off and pumped to storage, or, in the case of case of the high purity product, pressure transfered directly from the final column to a properly cooled and purged truck backed right up to the column. The high purity product can be as low as 0.3 ppm 02 by proper application of these procedures. Liquid Argon is the only product for which standing, loaded, trailers are provided vent recovery lines. The recovered gas is fed back to the crude Ar stream. The local O2 monitoring equipment is a Teledyne 306WA with ranges of 1, 10, 100 and 1000 PPM full scale. The wet cell unit is available from ENPRO for an estimated $3,500. The N2 in Ar is measured by a special in-house Linde instrument.
- Research Organization:
- Fermi National Accelerator Lab. (FNAL), Batavia, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-07CH11359
- OSTI ID:
- 1031812
- Report Number(s):
- FERMILAB-D0-EN-283; TRN: US201201%%1002
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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