WEEK 7 IN HLL ORAI

Time has been flying by, and now week 7 has ended during my summer training here at Orai. This was a very eventful week for me, and for the factory as well. This week, the factory was visited by Mr. Doug Baillie, the CEO of HLL, Mr. Dhaval Buch, the ED of Supply Chain in HLL, and Mr. Jayakumar, the GM operations North in HLL. Their visit was an important one for the factory, and the entire factory had geared up to welcome the visitors, withal the charts and production data etc, which also updated and the latest versions put on. Also presentations were made to brief the CEO about the factory, its strategic location for HLL, and the production and compliance data. I had the opportunity to meet these people in the evening during the dinner, and was very impressed by the cool, calm laid back attitude of the people who among themselves manage over Rs. 12000 Crores worth of empire. On my projects side, the week began with me making a CP for the glycerine plant automation. I had already gone through the glycerine plant P & ID and had also studied and made the logics involved in the system, so I had an idea of how the system would work once it is automated and how it would benefit the company to make it a continuous process instead of the current batch mode. It would improve the steam economy and to meet the current requirements, the plant would be required to operate only 5 days a week in the continuous mode, instead of current situation of 7 days a week in batch mode, this would happen due to better evaporation rate of sweet water obtained due to instrumentation and accuracy obtained in the automated plant. On Wednesday, I was given another project, which would involve heat and mass balance on the entire cooling circuit of DFA, which included the intercooler circuit and the cooling tower circuit, as the factory had been experiencing problems with the cooling of DFA plant, which had even resulted in shutting down of DFA plant for one day in between, so my task was to analyze the cooling tower and ICW circuit and to find out the heat balance, and the possibly the reasons why the system was not working. During this week, I took the temperature readings wherever possible on the ICW circuit in various conditions, like normal running condition, in morning as well as evening, in various conditions like with the make up water on, without the make up water on, with the entire barometric water through the PHE (primary Heat Exchanger) and through the SHE etc. I was also explained the vacuum system in the DFA plant, which included the steam ejector system (dual) along with the barometric circuit, which would give the required vacuum in the system, this also involved a study of the condensable as well as the non condensable load in the system. The vacuum system uses the steam ejectors which in a way use the Bernoulli’s principle in evacuating air out of the system, i.e. the ejectors are like C-D nozzles, and when the steam passes through it, the velocity increases, and the pressure decreases, and since everything flows from high to low pressure, the gases are sucked out of the system by the ejectors, and that is how the system works.
Now this week was completed with entire set of data collection, which I had to compile, the next week would be the heat and mass balance of the system, and then analyzing the week points, and their reasons.
On the personal front, the week was again busy with work during the day, and badminton sessions at the night, which have now become a regular feature of late nights here.