Air Pollution Control Innovations

Enivtech will be attending the 2019 International Conference on Thermal Treatment Technologies and Hazardous Waste Combustors  (IT3/HWC)  October 2-3 in Houston, TX. A paper will be given on “Technology Solutions for Sulfuric Acid Formation and Removal in Liquid Waste and Waste Gas Thermal Oxidizers”. The paper is available for download by clicking the button at the bottom of this blog piece.

Petrochemical plants, refineries, and waste-oil re-refiners operate liquid waste or waste gas thermal oxidizers. The thermal oxidizers need a wet scrubber to neutralize and remove SO2. Flue gas entering the scrubber contains some sulfur trioxide (SO3) which is converted to sulfuric acid (H2SO4) in the presence of water vapor. Sulfuric acid is a submicron liquid aerosol that can pass through downstream equipment, such as a packed bed absorber or a baghouse. Some facilities are now being regulated for H2SO4.

Over the last decade, Envitech has supplied SO2 scrubbers for thermal oxidizers burning sulfur containing compounds in refining applications. Most of these do not have add-on controls for capturing sulfuric acid mist. More recently, however, Envitech has supplied two systems with candle filters for the capture of sulfuric acid mist. Another known system used a wet electrostatic precipitator for the capture of sulfuric acid mist. A potential fourth system with a large gas flow rate with expected SO3 emissions was evaluated for a wet electrostatic precipitator.

A thermal oxidizer converts sulfur containing liquid or gaseous waste in the presence of excess oxygen to sulfur dioxide (SO2). A fraction of SO2 is further converted to SO3. The reaction is:

SO2 + 1/2O2 => SO3

The conversion amount is influenced by many factors including the thermal oxidizer operating temperature, residence time, sulfur concentration, amount of excess air, and the presence of catalytic oxides and metal catalysts in the fuel. Literature suggests that even a well-performing thermal oxidizer still converts 1 to 5% of SO2 into SO3. Given the numerous factors influencing the formation of SO3¬, most designers select a conservative estimate of SO3 conversion, even when actual SO3 emissions have been measured, as variations in operation can generate substantially higher conversion.

Once formed in the thermal oxidizer, SO3 reacts with water in the downstream quencher to form sulfuric acid (H2SO4) by the reaction:

SO3(g) + H2O(l) => H2SO4(l)

At temperatures below 350°F, H2SO4 condenses into submicron liquid droplets which are difficult to remove because of their small size. Aerosol droplets pass through a quencher and packed bed absorber. A separate control device is needed for sulfuric acid removal that is suitable for submicron droplets.

Click on the link below to download the IT3/HWC conference paper to learn about “Technology Solutions for Sulfuric Acid Formation and Removal in Liquid Waste and Waste Gas Thermal Oxidizers”. The paper evaluates and compares candle filters versus wet electrostatic precipitators (WESPs) for H2SO4 removal in these types of applications.

Venturi scrubbers are mechanical impaction devices that are used to control particulate on a wide range of applications. These include medical and hazardous waste incineration, potash drying, sewage sludge incineration and processing, coal drying, mineral wool manufacturing, and copper roasting to name a few.  In one of my last blog posts I discussed a Venturi collision scrubber used to treat exhaust fumes of a Banbury mixer for rubber compounding.  The Envitech collision scrubber is used in several Goodyear Tire manufacturing facilities around the world.   

A recent new application is a horizontal Venturi scrubber for an aggregate asphalt drum dyer.  The asphalt process is semi-stationary operating at fixed locations for several months at a time. The process is periodically broken down and moved to new locations for operation.  The horizontal arrangement makes the horizontal Venturi scrubber an ideal solution for mobile applications.  The equipment package is transportable on a single flatbed with only minor disassembly required for shipment and installation.  The equipment is mounted onto a skid with pre-assembled piping and wiring to facilitate equipment mobility. 

Particles are captured in the horizontal Venturi scrubber through a process of impaction by water droplets injected into the Venturi throat.  A fraction of particulate laden water becomes entrained in the gas which has a droplet size distribution.  The droplets are removed from the gas by a mist eliminator.   There are two pathways for particles to escape capture by the scrubber. The first is penetration.  Smaller particles lacking the mass for impaction penetrate through the scrubber.  The second is through carry over of particulate laden water droplets.  Droplet capture efficiency, or mist elimination, therefore impacts scrubber efficiency and overall plant emissions.

The horizontal Venturi scrubber uses a damper blade and actuator to maintain constant pressure drop across a wide range of gas flows.  A high efficiency chevron mist eliminator removes particulate laden droplets before the gas exits the scrubber.  A chevron mist eliminator removes greater than 99.9% of water droplets down to 27 microns with less than 0.25 inches W.C. of pressure drop.  By comparison, a cyclonic separator requires several inches W.C. of pressure drop to remove 98% of 27 microns droplets.   The advantages of a chevron mist eliminator are higher performance, larger turn down ratio, and lower pressure drop.

Envitech is currently building two new horizontal Venturi scrubbers sized for 45,000 acfm each for a peat drying operation. The compact design allows the scrubber to be easily installed inside a building. The high level of pre-assembly and lower profile reduces installation time and improves maintenance access for plant personnel.  The horizontal Venturi scrubber can be a cost effective alternative to many processes that use a typical vertical arrangement.

Click on the link below to download Venturi scrubber literature.

Packed bed absorbers are often used to treat gaseous emissions for reasonably large gas flow rates ranging from a few thousand cfm to greater than 70,000 cfm. Common emissions include SOx, HCl, HF, and NOx. The absorbers are often custom engineered for a specific plants and have been used for secondary lead smelters, geothermal power plants, waste oil-re-refiners, ceramic tile manufacturing, waste incinerators, and ethanol plants. The types of emission sources range from thermal oxidizers, regenerative thermal oxidizers (RTO’s), furnaces, kilns, direct fired heaters, incinerators, fermenters, vent tanks, and batch mixers.

Envitech developed a lab scrubber to provide an economic solution for smaller gas flow rate applications.  The lab scrubber is a packaged unit designed for high efficiency of water soluble contaminants and can handle up to 2,000 cfm of gas at a maximum temperature of 180°F. The system is engineered for reduced footprint at 4 ft x 4 ft and includes a pre-wired control panel and pre-piped service utility connections requiring minimal installation and maintenance costs. Scrubber units are configurable to different levels of automation and treatment applications.  

A recent lab scrubber is for a manufacturer of pharmaceutical products in Southern, California. The scrubber is designed to remove HCl from the exhaust of several small laboratory process vent streams. The vent streams includes low organic concentrations which are incompatible with many common plastic materials. Special resin was selected for the fiber reinforced plastic (FRP) vessel and ductwork.  Piping and valves were assembled using PVDF.  The scrubber is designed for a classified area with explosion proof motors and instruments and is provided as a turn-key installation.

Another example  is a process vent scrubber for a blending facility in South Carolina that produces crop protection products for agricultural markets.  The vent stream is 1,500 cfm and includes HCl and water soluble particulate greater than 3 micron in size. The Envitech lab scrubber was configured to include a low pressure drop Venturi for particulate control combined with a packed bed absorber for HCl control.  The system includes instruments, control system, recirculation pump, pre-assembled piping, valves, and fittings, interconnect duct, ID fan, and stack. 

A different use for a lab scrubber includes an ethylenediamine (EDA) scrubber installed in the South Eastern United States.  The storage of this precursor chemical requires extra handling than is typical with other common industrial chemicals.  With a relatively low exposure limit of 10 ppm, storage tanks must be properly engineered and scrubbed to remove excess vapors.  The Envitech lab scrubber is an ideal, low cost solution for this type of storage system.

Please click on the link below to download a brochure and case studies for the lab scrubber.

Venturi Scrubbers are used to control particulate on a wide range of applications including medical and hazardous waste incineration, pot ash mining, sewage sludge processing and incineration, coal drying, textile and mineral wool insulation manufacturing and copper roasting. A previous blog post in April discusses the mechanisms for particulate removal by a Venturi scrubber. One application for Venturi scrubbers is removal of fumes generated by a Banbury mixer. A Banbury mixer is an industrial mixer used in a wide range of applications including food, chemical, pharmaceutical, plastic, mineral, and rubber processing. Banbury mixers are used, for instance, to compound rubber material for manufacturing automobile tires. Uncontrolled fumes from the mixers can create a nuisance by settling around the facility. Envitech’s Venturi collision scrubber has been used to control these fumes. The figure on the right shows a typical Venturi collision scrubber for a 25,000 cfm mixer exhaust. The scrubber separates the exhaust into two streams internal to the scrubber. The streams are then directed to two opposing Venturi throats. Recirculated water injected into each throat is atomized into fine droplets as the gas is accelerated. Fume particles and droplets collide and are captured by the atomized water as the steams are recombined into a third Venturi throat. A diffusion section redistributes the gas to a horizontal chevron style mist eliminator to remove entrained water droplets. Water is collected and drained into a common sump and recirculated back to the Venturi throats. A blowdown stream purges the collected material.

The scrubber is designed for 24/7, semi-automatic operation and is skid mounted with redundant pumps, one operating and one spare. Instruments are pre-mounted into the piping assembly and pre-wired to a junction box. The systems are often provided with an ID fan which can be mounted on the roof of the building. Typical design conditions and performance are indicated in the table below.

*particles > 2.5 microns

Envitech Venturi collision scrubbers have been in operation at several tire manufacturing facilities since the early 80’s. Over 17 systems have been installed including several in recent years.

Click on the icon below to download a case study for Envitech Venturi Collision scrubbers learn how the scrubber solved the emission problems for Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.

Venturi Scrubbers are used to control particulate on a wide range of applications including medical and hazardous waste incineration, pot ash mining, sewage sludge processing and incineration, coal drying, tire manufacturing, and copper roasting. One particular application is glass fiber manufacturing which can include both textile fiber and wool fiber insulation. Both types of fibers are manufactured by similar processes which use high-temperature to convert raw materials (predominantly borosilicates) into glass fibers. Emissions control is needed for both glass melting and fiber forming and finishing processes. A survey of stack test data from 10 manufacturing lines at different glass furnace operations demonstrate typical particulate emissions in the range of 0.0035 gr/dscf to 0.015 gr/dscf for volumetric gas flow rates ranging from 20,000 dscfm to 50,000 dscm. Most of these lines use a 10 in. W.C. pressure drop Venturi scrubbers. A few use wet electrostatic precipitators (WESP’s). Stack test data and particle size distribution (PSD) data indicate there can be significant differences in particle size distribution between different glass furnace manufacturing lines which account for the range in outlet concentrations. The figure on the right shows removal efficiency by particle size for a 10” pressure drop Venturi. It indicates that nearly all particles > 2 micron in size are removed by the Venturi. Performance drops off dramatically, however, for smaller particles. Mechanisms for particulate removal by a Venturi scrubber are discussed in more detail in an earlier blog post, dated April 14, 2016.

The image below shows a typical Venturi scrubber used for glass fiber manufacturing facility. The process exhaust gas passes through the Venturi scrubber throat for particulate removal. The Venturi has a variable throat damper that is pneumatically actuated for maintaining the Venturi scrubber pressure drop over a minimum and maximum gas flow rate.  The damper position is governed by proportional-integral-derivative control based on the differential pressure across the throat. 

After the Venturi scrubber throat the gas passes through a flooded elbow and enters a vertical entrainment separator through a tangential inlet. Large water droplets are removed by centrifugal forces by the spin induced by the tangential entry. After passing through internals to smooth the gas flow distribution, the gas passes through a vertical chevron style mist eliminator to remove remaining water droplets from the gas. A spray header provides a periodic wash to keep the chevrons clean from particulate and debris.   Liquid from the Venturi is collected in the entrainment separator sump and re-circulated to the Venturi throat. A blowdown stream is taken from the recirculation line to purge the collected particulate.

Venturi scrubbers have proven to be highly reliable on a wide range of applications, including several collecting fibrous material. Several considerations should be taken into account to design reliability into the system.  A well designed Venturi scrubber can operate continuously with just one or two shifts of maintenance per year. Although Venturi scrubbers are quite common on glass fiber manufacturing lines some sites have relied on wet electrostatic precipitators (WESP) to meet emission limits. This may be driven by a combination of the particle size distribution (PSD) of the process and site specific permit limits. In general, a WESP is used when there is a large fraction of submicron particulate that exceeds the capability of the Venturi scrubber to meet the permit limit. A WESP has higher capital cost, but will have lower operating cost from lower energy consumption.

Click on the icon below to view a video of a variable throat Venturi scrubber damper blade.

In 2009, the US EPA revised the emission limits for the Hospital, Medical, and Infectious Waste Incinerator (HMIWI) MACT standard. You can follow the link to the blog piece published in May 2013 on the new standard. It dramatically reduced the emission limits for several pollutants including particulate (PM), lead (Pb), and dioxins and furans (D/F). Several existing medical waste incinerators in operation at the time were not capable of meeting the new limits, especially for lead (Pb) and/or dioxin and furans (D/F). Cost effective add-on controls were needed to bring existing system into compliance with the new rules and to allow them to continue to operate.

To meet this new challenge, Envitech designed a carbon bed adsorber and filter package to be installed downstream of existing wet scrubbers. The package is comprised of a new fan to overcome additional system pressure drop. Heat of compression from the fan and a re-heater duct heats the wet gas above the dew point to prevent condensation fouling in downstream filter and/or carbon bed adsorber. The system is delivered pre-assembled on a skid to reduce installation time and cost. A cartridge filter removes low concentrations of condensed Pb particulate. The carbon bed adsorber removes dioxins, furans and mercury (Hg). Envitech has upgraded four medical waste incinerators to meet the new MACT standards. All four are operational and compliant with the new standards.

In one case for Wyoming Medical Center (WMC), space was limited for add-on controls. The system had to be installed outdoors and capable of withstanding below freezing temperatures. The existing system did not meet the new limits for lead (Pb) and dioxins/furnace (D/F).The add-on controls included a cartridge filter and a carbon bed adsorber. The equipment was insulated and heat traced to maintain temperature above the dew point after re-heat. System features include:

•  Shop and skid mounted assembly for ease of installation.
• Insulation and heat tracing for outdoor operation in a cold climate.
• Silicon controlled rectifier (SCR) controller to control the heater duct.
• Compressed air pulse cleaning for automatic particulate removal from the cartridge filters.
• Pre-wired instrumentation to a control box located on the skid.
• Manways to facilitate maintenance access.

The system has been operational since 2014 and has been used on a routine basis during cold winter months.   The system comfortably passed a stack test in 2015. Compliance for lead (Pd) is 20 times below the limit and Dioxins/Furans (D/F) is 5 times below the limit. The re-heat and filter package has been used on several other medical waste incinerators and provide a cost effective solution for meeting stringent emission limits. 

Download a free case study to find out how Wymoming Medical Center met the new EPA HMIWI emission limits for their existing medical waste incinerator.

Download a free white paper from the 2010 Internationa Conference on Thermal Treatment Technologies and Hazardous Waste Combustors (IT3/HWC) on the 2009 HMIWI MACT standard for medicl waste incinerators.

A Venturi scrubber is a common air pollution control device that is used to remove particulate. Because it is a wet scrubber, collected particulate is purged in a liquid discharge stream called the blowdown.

Venturi scrubbers are commonly used for industrial dryer applications (see photo). They have a relatively low inlet temperature or might have sticky particulate which prevent the use of a bag-house. Typical dryer applications include coal dryers, pot ash mining, CPVC plastics manufacturing, bio-solids sludge drying, or salt production. Venturi scrubbers are also used in insulation or glass manufacturing, magnesium mining, and hazardous and medical waste incineration.

It is important to saturate or pre-cool the gas before entering the Venturi throat to minimize evaporation. That is because during evaporation, water molecules leave the water droplet surfaces which push particles away from the droplets and reduce collection efficiency. It is also important to keep the inlet walls of the Venturi wetted to avoid fouling from wet-dry line interface.

In accordance with Bernoulli's equation, inlet gas accelerates at the converging section of the Venturi throat, increasing gas-liquid contact. As water is injected perpendicular to the gas flow in the throat, the accelerated gas particles are captured by water droplets upon collision. Three mechanisms account for collection in a Venturi which is summarized below. The adjacent graphic scrubber illustrates the three mechanisms.

• Diffusion – Particle is so small its path is erratic due to Brownian motion.
• Interception – Particle follows streamline around droplet, makes contact if within a particle radius.
• Impaction – Particle’s inertia cause it to leave stream line and impact the droplet.

Impaction is the dominant collection mechanism for large particles, greater than 15 microns. They can be collected with efficiency greater than 99%. Diffusion and interception are more prevalent for smaller particles. Collection efficiency is lower for these particles because their small size increases the probability they will flow around the water droplets and avoid collection.

The graph below illustrates the impact of particle size on collection efficiency. The vertical axis is collection efficiency and the horizontal axis is pressure drop. The curves represent different particle sizes ranging from 0.2 to 5 microns. It can be seen that collection efficiency increases for larger particles and higher pressure drops. The net result is overall collection efficiency is dependent on the aerodynamic particle size distribution (PSD).

After particle collection in the Venturi throat, the resulting droplets aggregate through the diverging section and are separated from the process gas by the mist eliminator (ME) in the entrainment separator (ES). The ability of the mist eliminator to remove water droplets from the gas stream can have a significant impact on the scrubber performance. Any water droplets that "escape" the ME will carry entrained particulate and increase the measured outlet emissions. A more detailed discussion on mist elimination can be found in the previous blog post on “Improving Entrainment Separator Design”.

To download a free case study on a Venturi scrubber used to remove particulate from a CPVC dryer.

Envitech will attend the International Conference on Thermal Treatment Technologies (IT3/HWC), October 20-22, 2015 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown, Houston, Texas.  The preliminary technical program can be downloaded from the conference website.   The conference features key note speakers from Veolia, Clean Harbors, Essroc, TCEQ, and B3 Systems.

Envitech will have an exhibit booth and present a paper, “Meeting the New Hospital, Medical, and Infectious Waste Incinerator (HMIWI) MACT with a Wet Electrostatic Precipitator (WESP)”.  The paper will provide an overview of a new medical waste incinerator scrubber system with a wet electrostatic precipitator to treat the off gas from two existing medical waste incinerators. The new system was required to achieve a 20% reduction in particulate (PM) emissions, and a 93% reduction in lead (Pb) emissions from the previous gas cleaning system.  The new system has been operational since October 2014.  The table below compares the performance of the emission limits to the new compliance standards. The results demonstrate the system comfortably meets the new EPA MACT standards.