Flexibility is Key to Solving Air Pollution Abatement Challenges - Trevor Lawton

Modern air pollution regulations increasingly demand the deployment of more flexible abatement systems to address the growing complexity of air pollution regulations, which have to address a multi-tiered array of local authority, national and international requirements. The ever increasing pressure to reduce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is making it more difficult for plant operators to determine the most suitable pollution system for their process. Many air pollution applications call for highly flexible abatement systems to be designed and deployed, especially where there is a requirement for batch based production runs. Low running costs together with the ability to run the abatement system at low process flowrates are vital. A quick start up system is also a major benefit.

Once the pollution regulator establishes and confirms what emission limits have to be achieved for a specific plant then a plan can be formulated to establish the plant’s exact emissions which need to be known in order to set about designing a suitable abatement system.

The kind of information that is required includes:

•Exhaust flow rate and temperature.

•The concentration of pollutants or VOCs and any variations during operating hours.

•Number of operating hours of the process.

Once the plant data has been measured and confirmed then it can be assessed to help determine the most appropriate pollution control system solution.