On the plant a FTIR analysis system had been installed. The FTIR had frequent failures forcing repeated arrests of the plant and consequently of the waste disposal. The client asked to opus automazione to analyze the conditions which caused the anomaly. The required measurements, for each line, were: CO, CO2, SO2, NO, NO2, O2, NH3, HCl, TOC, Hg, sampling dioxins, dust, flow, temperature.
The fumes treatment inside a public incinerator for disposal of municipal solid waste and hospital waste, had some anomalies.
The emission treatment system included a scrubber which brought the concentration of H2O at a very high level, about 60%.
The FTIR could not maintain, in the measuring chamber, a sufficiently high temperature (180 ° C) to avoid condensation.
Such condensation opacified the reflection mirrors in the measurement chamber and hence the detector could not detect the measurement.
The solution provided by opus, consisted in radically changing the sampling system, gas transmission and treatment, trying to keep the gas temperature at least above 160°C. This solution also required the modification of the measuring chamber heating system, so it was necessary to intervene on the instrument, creating a situation that was suitable to be disputed by the FTIR analyzer manufacturer.
A costs/benefits analysis was prepared and the final solution has been to replace the l’analizzatore FTIR with a multi parametric 8 channels analyzer..
The choice was successful: 6 years later the plant was doubled as heating capacity and another incineration line was built.
The systems are currently operating with three gas lines with automatic switching on two multi-parametric multichannel analyzers. The data acquisition software, compliant with applicable regulations, implements the hot redundancy of servers for maximum functionality guarantee.