WEEK 3- Some new experiences

My third week in HLL is coming to an end, and this week like others was full of new learning experiences. So on Saturday and Monday, I completed my project brief along with the suggestions, on Tuesday it was review time for the project brief, and I was told to study about the line from the back side of the conveying system, i.e. the system comprising of BLS, pan, crutcher and mazzonis at the end. So in the next three days I learned about BLS (Bran & Leubbe & Supraton) technique where the DFA, or oil blends is mixed with brine, caustic, and water. I found out the stroke length, and diameter for each of this components, and found out the capacity of the system at current settings, which comes out to be around 8-8.4 TPH for the noodles from the use of 6.5 TPH of DFA, which would produce approximately 10.2 TPH of neat soap, which would then be readied in the pan, along with quality checking, and then fed into the scrap tank, from where it is fed into the Mazzoni which would then convert it into soap noodles using vacuum drying of the neat soap. The neat soap has 32% MIV where as the soap noodles and the final soap has 15-16 % of MIV, it is in the Mazzoni through spraying and then creating vacuum that the moisture gets sucked out of the neat soap, and from there the soap noodles are conveyed using the pneumatic conveying system (which is the major bottleneck because at the current capacity, the mazzonis can produce constantly 8-8.4 TPH but because of the faulty conveying system, they are forced to run at a lower throughput, which decreases the entire system efficiency. Parallel to this current design project, I am also involved with the team to implement a few of the other changes in the conveying system like checking the efficiency of the heat exchanger, which has become quite ineffective for the air cooling, so plans are on to set up TCDs in the system for checking the accurate inlet and outlet temperature for heat exchanger and also finding out the effect of using water from the chiller for this purpose, so as to cool the air. Also the dust bags in the system are not working, so there is a need for the purging system to be correctly timed, which is not working as of now, and necessary instrumentation like timer card etc have to be ordered for the same.
On the personal front, the week has been good. I have played a lot of badminton at night in the recreational centre along with pool and nights now are becoming something to look forward to.