FLUID HANDLING AND FLUID POWER

SILVER TO THE CORPS The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is going for an environmentally friendly distinction in a major building project in Virginia. The Corps is overseeing construction of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agencys New Campus East, which will include an eight-story main building of 2.1 million square feet, a technology center, central utility plant, visitor center, and other structures. The Corps has set the goal of certifying the main building for a silver rating under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program of the U.S. Green Building Council. The LEED program rates buildings on several environmental criteria: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts. There are several rating systems for different kinds of projects. New Campus East is registered under the Green Building Councils Version 2.2 project checklist. A total of 110 points is possible, and a building must earn at least 26 points to be certified at all. A score of at least 33 points is needed to qualify for silver certification.

Silver points: The New Campus East main building (at rear, top) will have an atrium roof (above) using lightweight ETFE film.

The New Campus East, in the North Area of Fort Belvoir in Springfield, Va., will house the East Coast operations of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a unit of the U.S. Department of Defense. The agency develops imagery, maps, and charts used for national defense, homeland security, and navigation. Much of its work is classified. Key features that are expected to help the new building qualify for LEED silver are a climate control system using chilled beams, and an atrium roof of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE. Vivek Gowda, a consultant to the Army Corps of Engineers, is the project engineer for the main office building envelope, and Rob Purvis of the construction management consulting firm McDonough Bolyard Peck is the project engineer coordinating mechanical aspects of the main office building construction. They provided us information through a spokesman.

According to Purvis, the main building will use more than 4,100 chilled beams, which are installed on the ceiling for temperature control similar to standard air diffusers. They will be in various shapes and capacities, according to the cooling load to be handled. The supplier, Trox USA, told us that chilled beams have been widely used in Europe, but are fairly new to the U.S. market. They are induction diffusers used in air-water systems that can provide ventilation, heating, and cooling. Using water as the heattransfer medium makes the system very efficient. Trox USA, a subsidiary of a German parent, manufactures the products at a factory in Georgia. The green advantage of the ETFE roofing system is called low embodied energy. That is, the material does not require a great deal of energy to make. The weight of the ETFE film used in the roof is 1 percent the weight of glass and costs 24 to 70 percent less to install. It can bear 400 times its own weight. It is self-cleaning because of its nonstick properties and is recyclable. The supplier, Vector Foiltec GmbH of Bremen, Germany, calls the material Texlon, because it is a derivative of Teflon. According to Gowda, the roof will allow natural light to pass through, but it is configured to inhibit excessive radiant heat gain. The roof system is an inflated pillow in five layers including two layers of entrapped air. The top and middle layer are ETFE printed with reflective frit in circular and hexagonal patterns, which provide a reflectance of 48 percent. Two captive air layers approximately 10 inches thick, maintained under pressure, provide thermal insulation. The bottom layer is transparent ETFE. Alexander Jafari, a marketing executive for Vector Foiltec in the U.S., said inflation is maintained at 200 to 230 pascals, or just over 4 pounds per square foot. The inflator runs half the timeon for five minutes and then off for five. Construction began in 2007 and agency staff will start moving into the Main Office Building this coming January; the move will be complete by September.

FIRST STEPS TO STORE GAS BENEATH THE IRISH SEA THE DEVELOPER OF A PROPOSED NATURAL GAS STORAGE FACILITY UNDER THE IRISH SEA HAS AWARDED ITS FIRST ENGINEERING CONTRACTS, WHICH WENT TO THREE COMPANIES. The proposal calls for the construction of storage caverns in salt beds about 750 meters below the floor of the East Irish Sea off the northwest coast of England. The area contains significant natural gas reserves, but according to a spokesman for the project, the siting of the Gateway storage facility is independent of the gas fields. It received its first gas storage license from the U.K. government in February. The project, which is expected to cost more than 600 million, equivalent to nearly $970 million, will have a capacity of 1.5 billion cubic meters. That will equal about 30 percent of the United Kingdoms current storage capacity and will hold enough natural gas to supply the entire country for five days, according to the developer, Gateway Storage Co. Ltd. Gateway has awarded contracts for front-end engineering design to AMEC, Parsons Brinckerhoff, and Senergy. Gateway, which is still organizing funding for the full project, said it expects to begin services at the site in 2014. The Gateway storage facility will feed into the U.K.s National Gas Transmission System by a new pipeline that will connect to a gas compression station next to the Morecambe gas terminals at Barrow-in-Furness about 25 km away. According to Gateway, AMECs work will include offshore installations, pipelines, the onshore compression station, and the connections to the National Grid; Parsons Brinckerhoff will look into the design and construction of the salt caverns; Senergy will concentrate on the offshore infrastructure, installation, logistics, and well designs. Stag Energy Development Co. Ltd. of Edinburgh is managing the project. The projects engineering team is based in Aberdeen.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ROUTINE DETAILS By Amrit Ramnanan AN AMMONIA PLANT IN TRINIDAD WAS BUILT ACCORDING TO WELL-ESTABLISHED PROCESS DESIGN PRINCIPLES. The reliance on the tried and true, however, permitted the approval of drawings that contained an evident error, which could not be completely corrected and has left a weak point in the plant. The oversight involves the boiler feedwater preheater. This component, a TEMA class BXU shell and tube heat exchanger, preheats a stream of boiler feedwater by cooling the effluent of the high-temperature shift reactor. The exchanger contains 342 SA179 carbon steel U tubes and 108 SA249 TP304L stainless steel U tubes. The hot effluent enters the shell side at 285 C and leaves at 204 C. Boiler feedwater is heated from 130 C to 234 C. Based on dew point analysis, there is no risk of condensation at the shell side inlet nozzle, but as the gas is cooled to 204 C there is a possibility of condensation.

Cause for concern: A boiler feedwater preheater was built with carbon and stainless steel U tubes in the wrong positions, presenting a risk of corrosion on the carbon side. When the tubes were swapped at the job site, the carbon steel venthole nozzle could not be changed and so remained on the cooler side and must be constantly monitored for signs of corrosion.

The design intent was to have the carbon steel tubes at the shell side inlet nozzle and the stainless steel tubes at the shell side outlet. The positions of the stainless and carbon tubes were inadvertently reversed in the drawings. Even though the error was clear, the drawings were approved and the parts were fabricated accordingly. This meant that the preheaters carbon steel tubes were exposed to cooled effluent gas. When the preheater was delivered, the contractor decided to correct the problem on site. The stainless steel inlet distributor plate was moved from the side next to the stainless tubes to the side next to the carbon tubes. By rotating the preheater 180 degrees for installation, the carbon tubes were in the intake position to be exposed to the effluent at its hottest, far above the dew point. The preheater includes a carbon steel tubesheet venthole nozzle, which was originally located at the hot shell side inlet. After the modification, the 180-degree rotation reoriented the venthole nozzle. So the carbon steel nozzle is at the cooler shell side outlet. The dew point temperature at 10.9 bar (158.93 psi) is 185 C, 19 C below the nominal exit temperature of the effluent. During startup, shutdown, and upset conditions corrosive process condensate can form. The effluent contains about 3 percent CO and 15 percent CO2. CO-CO2 stress corrosion cracking characteristics include cracking that is transgranular, localized near welds, and is associated with pitting and ring worm corrosion. Because the drawings represented a routine engineering design, a critical error was overlooked. Now, a plant must maintain a program of continual monitoring, relying on profile radiographic inspection and ultrasonic thickness checks to ensure that part of a key component does not fail unexpectedly.

Amrit Ramnanan is a mechanical engineer at the ammonia complex in Trinidad.

THINKING OUTSIDE THE SPRINKLER By William Reilly TODAY, ENGINEERS WHO SPECIFY AND WORK WITH FIRE SUPPRESSION SYSTEMS CAN CHOOSE FROM A LARGE VARIETY OF TECHNOLOGY CONFIGURATIONS OF VARYING COMPLEXITY. From traditional water-based sprinkler systems, the simplest and most widely used, to CO2, chemical, and inert gas systems, each technology has unique advantages and disadvantages depending on the hazard application. Some systems require air-tight room integrity with little or no ventilation in order to ensure effective fire suppression. Some systems suppress fire with water or chemicals that can cause irreversible damage to expensive equipment. The water and chemicals often require costly and time-consuming cleanup after discharge. Some of the chemicals may also be classified as hazardous, compounding the expense of cleanup. Chemical systems can be expensive to recharge. Many systems can deplete oxygen levels to a threshold that is intolerable to humans. As a manufacturer of grooved piping systems well-known for our fire protection solutions, Victaulic set out to develop an alternative system that would address all these issues. Our team researched other fields outside of fire protection that we hoped would lead to some solution paths to the goal of making even finer water particle sizes. Atomizing fluids has been long studied in other fields such as combustion science. Thinking outside the realm of traditional water mist methods that have been based on water being mechanically sheared by injecting it onto deflectors, Victaulic researched different hardware concepts for fluid atomization with parallel gas flow.

Our research showed that combining cooling and oxygen dilution could be even more effective than either one alone. This combination was achieved with the Victaulic teams use of nitrogen gas to atomize the water and act as a particle carrier to penetrate fire plumes. The Victaulic team focused on a method of injecting the atomized droplets into a nitrogen down-blast to penetrate into fire plumes to get to the root of the fire for more efficient cooling using smaller than typical droplets, which collectively present a greater surface area. The larger the surface area, the faster that heat may be absorbed. A high rate of heat absorption reduces the risk of fire propagation by reducing convective and radiative heat transfers. The result of these efforts is a new category of fire suppression technology recognized by FM Approvals, an independent thirdparty product testing and certification laboratory. The laboratory established a new standard, FM 5580 Hybrid Water & Inert Gas for Fire Extinguishing Systems, for the hybrid discharge technology. Because it uses a unique blend of inert clean agent gas and water mist, it is suitable for special hazard machinery spaces, turbine enclosures, and flammable liquids. So far, the only system in this category is the Victaulic Vortex fire suppression system.

HOW IT WORKS The Victaulic Vortex system uses a supersonic jet stream of nitrogen to atomize a low-pressure stream of water into droplets less than 10 m wide. The droplets are as little as one 30th the size of water particles delivered by traditional water mist systems and provide as much as 50 percent more heat absorption and total extinguishing. As they are atomized, the water droplets are evenly mixed with the nitrogen molecules and discharged into the hazard space in homogeneous suspension. Typically, in other twin-fluid technologies, nitrogen is a propellant of another suppressing agent like water mist, but the Victaulic Vortex system uses the water mist and nitrogen as complementary extinguishing agents. For smaller fires, the nitrogen is the primary extinguishing agent and reduces the oxygen to a level that is still breathable, but cannot sustain combustion. For larger fires, the ultra-fine water droplets cool the fire by absorbing the heat and reducing available oxygen. The water released per emitter is as little as one gallon per minute. Traditional water sprinklers release more than 25 gallons per minute, and high-pressure water mist systems release eight gallons per nozzle per minute. The system uses no hazardous chemicals. During system discharge, oxygen saturation remains at safe levels for occupants. During discharge, and in the absence of a fire, oxygen is depleted, but only to a level between 15 and 14 percent, which is considered tolerable by the EPA. The controlled discharge of the Victaulic Vortex system permits proper egress from a fire while the system is activated. End-point results are based upon an extended discharge of five minutes. Water and nitrogen are readily available, and since there is minimal clean-up required and minimal wetting, there is very little disruption to ongoing operations. Due to the high-velocity swirling vortex discharge of the system, room integrity is not required. Each Victaulic Vortex emitter can protect up to 2,500 cubic feet of space, and the system is scalable to cover as much space as required. Zones can be centrally controlled and independently activated for fire suppression where it is needed. The Victaulic Vortex system also features a low operating discharge pressure of approximately 25 psig at the system emitter. Most high-pressure water mist systems operate at 1,500 to 2,500 psig, and inert gas systems operate at 2,500 psig. The low discharge pressure of the Victaulic Vortex system is especially beneficial in corrosive environments, because it allows for the use of plastic pipe, and emitters can be specially designed from PTFE/PVDF. This is not possible with CO2 or high-pressure water mist systems.

H2O MEETS N2 Nitrogen at 25 psig enters the emitter while water at less than 5 psig enters the water jacket external to the nitrogen flow. As nitrogen exits the emitter, shock discs are created as the flow changes speeds from sonic to subsonic. Additional shock discs are created when the nitrogen encounters the foil. When the water is introduced into these shock discs from the ring of concentric holes at the base of Victaulics patented emitter, it is atomized to ultra-fine droplets which are blended into the nitrogen flow at high velocity. After the water is atomized, it is carried in the nitrogen flow at equal partial pressures. Since the water is suspended in the nitrogen, it maintains its momentum and is capable of being projected for relatively large distances and, in the process, becoming entrained in fire plumes.

Emitter cross-section: Nitrogen enters the emitter at 25 psig. Water at 5 psig is entrained with the nitrogen flow through an array of holes at the base of the emitter.

Flow field: Shock discs are created as the nitrogen flow changes from sonic to subsonic speed. Additional shock discs are created when the nitrogen encounters the foil. Water introduced into the shock discs is atomized and blended into the nitrogen flow at high velocity.

FM Approvals has approved the system for special-hazard machinery spaces and turbine enclosures. In turbine enclosures, uniform cooling of the casing is critical to successful fire suppression. Uneven cooling can cause the equipment to shrink unevenly, allowing the blade to interfere with the casing at the risk of ruining the turbine. Suppressing fires within turbines and machine spaces also requires a system that can uniformly penetrate vented or shielded areas, without requiring room integrity. Victaulic Vortex has been tested and proven to be highly effective in these spaces, in part because of its high-velocity hybrid distribution and highly effective heat absorption. Victaulic Vortex has been recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency with a Significant New Alternatives Policy approval, listing the system as a hybrid inert gas, water-based system and an acceptable replacement for Halon 1301 in total flooding applications.