Smart moves

12 September 2005 00:01  [Source: ICB]

To take a plant to pieces, ship it around the world and re-build it could be costing the chemicals sector billions of dollars/year in unnecessary plant construction costs.

‘The difficulty traditionally associated with plant relocation is partly down to the mindset of the people taking the plant apart,’ says Marco Lopez, managing director of Exeter, UK-based, Exon Tech. Many of the people who do the work approach plant deconstruction from a scrapping or demolition background, not as a cataloguing and record-keeping exercise.

‘I saw one foreman remove all of the gauges from a plant and put them in a pile so he could “get on with it”, ’ said Lopez. ‘We had 200 scrap instruments by the time he finished. We don’t allow anyone to remove anything without giving it a label. A few thousand extra spent on dismantling processes can save hundreds of thousands at the assembly stage.’

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Exon Tech has developed a methodology and software package that allows chemical plants of any size or complexity to be disassembled and subsequently re-assembled cost-effectively.

The smallest job the process was used for was to relocate production from North London for Elizabeth Arden, the perfumer. It was also used by contractor Foster Wheeler last year to relocate a fertiliser plant for Chilean explosives firm Eanex from Ireland to Peru. In addition, the Exon Tech process has been used to help disassemble a plant from Yara’s site in Immingham in the UK and relocate it to Pakistan.

Lopez has 24 years of experience in mechanical engineering, design, process, installation and commissioning. He gained the idea for the software when faced with the task of marking up equipment that was transferred from Port Sunlight to the Czech Republic when soap production was moved there by Unilever. ‘I developed a software package to track progress,’ he says. This is licensed on a geographically exclusive basis and Exon Tech audits the performance of its licensees.

Lopez’s approach is to use the plant’s pipe and instrumentation (P&I) diagrams as the basis for component identification and disassembly. The plant is divided into modules, and the modules are divided into components. Each module is assigned to a foreman who has two or three staff who label, cut metal, and record the status and destination container or box for each component.

The P&I diagrams are manually marked with the cuts or flange breaks that are made between components at joints. The Exon Tech software generates the labels that give the P&I diagram details of the components. After the labels are printed, they are resin-bonded to the components and the cuts are made on the plant.

Operative or foremen’s signatures are needed at each stage of the process. Photographs of the module and components before and at different stages of disassembly are taken. Because a lot of work has been done in identifying each component, and to which other components they attach, ‘it is possible to reconstruct a plant using just the labels and no diagrams or photographs,’ says Lopez.

AutoCAD diagrams are also produced and these are used to help re-assemble the plant at its new location. ‘It takes about a week to train someone in how to do this, they buddy up and train their buddy and so on.... in a few weeks we can have many people on the plant.’

The Cork fertiliser job saw the number of people working on the mark-up grow to 16 at its peak. Overall it took about nine months to disassemble the plant with a team of between eight and 10 people.

WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT

‘We find the best people for the job are younger people who may not have done very well at school, but who are bright. The worst can be gas- and pipe-fitters who often have their own ideas about how the job should be done.’

The label data, which are currently paper-based but will become bar-coded, are resin-bonded to components. The label records the module, the component identification number and to which adjacent components it should be re-attached. The part is then tracked into its container for transportation.

A manifest for each container is produced. Duplicates are made; one is included in the container, another is sent to the customer, one to the dismantler and one is retained by Exon Tech until the job is complete.

Exon Tech is currently working on a total management solution from contract start to end, to reduce all handling risks from big transfer operations.

‘We want to put the plant on “wheels”, we want to encourage buyers and companies to engage on these transfer operations, and let us take on all the risk associated with the handling of the plant.’-

By: Simon Robinson
+44 20 8652 3214

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