Solenis LLC, a leading global producer of specialty chemicals, is proud to announce that a BASF site located in White Stone, South Carolina, is among the winners of a 2023 Solenis Sustainability Award. The White Stone operation, which produces surfactants for the personal care and cleaning industries, is being recognized for a boiler tuning effort that led to annual savings of $27,002 (makeup water savings of $3,911; wastewater savings of $7,821; and fuel savings of $15,270).

The BASF White Stone facility is a typical batch process chemical plant that uses steam from its three boilers in several critical processes. The boilers started experiencing carryover problems, which occurs when solids and other contaminants leave the boilers with the steam. Solids carried in the steam can form deposits in non-return and other control valves, affecting system efficiency. The escaping solids can also enter process streams, leading to product quality issues. As the carryover problem worsened, the White Stone facility was unable to sustain good boiler cycles.

Solenis team members worked closely with the White Stone maintenance staff to resolve the issue. This involved weekly interventions to diagnose likely causes, implement system tweaks, and analyze the results. According to Bill Crawford, the Solenis sales representative, it took longer than planned but the results have been positive. "There was little helpful data to view because the plant did not have a steam mass flow meter to capture critical metrics on their distributed control system for analysis," he noted. "That left us no choice but to iterate various strategies to tune the boilers and test the effects."