Recycled Ceramic Bed Support Media -- Not Without Hidden Costs and Risks
Refiners and chemical plant personnel need to clearly understand what risks are associated with reusing ceramic catalyst bed support media. Reclaimed bed support media doesn’t come without hidden costs and risks which can outweigh any cost savings and ultimately leads to costing your plant a lot more money and time.
Physical Properties
- Physical properties of catalyst support media previously used in high pressure hydrogen service can be seriously reduced far below acceptable standards.
- Vessel unloading and subsequent reclaiming processes can degrade the media’s crush strength and impact resistance – two key qualities necessary to the performance of catalyst bed support media.
- Subsequent reuse of reclaimed media can result in excessive breakage to chips and fines, thereby causing potential pressure drop and flow distribution problems within the reactor and plugging problems downstream.
- Catalyst bed support media are often porous by design, thereby allowing various contaminants to be captured. Some support media may take in sulfur or chlorine. Some support media may adsorb heavy metals. Some support media are even used to capture anything and everything, i.e. trash collection. Reclaiming support media used in sorption or trash collection for use in other processes can result in catalyst poisoning.
- Catalyst support media flushed from a unit or washed following prior use may be contaminated with soda, caustic or other potential catalyst poisons. Improper cleaning methods can cause poisons to leach during subsequent reuse resulting in loss of catalyst activity.
- Catalyst support media are not like catalysts – “spent” media has in fact lost the inherent physical properties crucial to its function and can never be regenerated to its original condition.
Quality Ramifications
- Reclaimed support media are often accumulated based on size, regardless of manufacturer or type. The media pedigree is often sketchy as previous use records are few and far between.
- Lot analysis from these accumulations may not accurately represent or reflect the potential problems previously used catalyst support media may cause.
- Standard handling procedures don’t measure up to quality standards such as ISO 9001:2000.
Refiners and chemical plant personnel need to closely guard their costly catalyst investment with a proven catalyst bed support media. The price of new catalyst support media is low compared to the price of the catalyst, so don’t take unnecessary risks with reclaimed catalyst bed support media. In the end, you’ll save not only your catalyst investment, but potential process risks.
Denstone® Support Media -- Always Reliable Support