Hi Michel,
Just back in office today after 1.5 weeks of travelling. My comments to your email below and your previous email are below.
Currently, both Taixing and Yichun have 6 reactors. The only difference is in the reactor size. Taixing is 6 m3 while Yichun is 10 m3.
Molecular distilled dimer is only produced in Yichun but not in Taixing. The mass balance given is for Taixing.
I am not sure about the on-stream time in reality and we can definitely discuss this when you are in Yichun.
In addition, we will definitely give you an overview of Yuanda when you are in Yichun. I believe you will have a better understanding of the current status after this presentation.
As you have rightly noted, heat transfer is the bottleneck in the current design, especially in the Yichun reactor where most of the time is used for heat transfer and not for reaction.
And you are also definitely right that the whole reactor section needs a thorough review to see what modifications can be done to improve the current process.
However, this has to be balanced with the fact that the Yichun plant will be shut down in 4 years and we will probably be using a new catalyst which would require a different process design.
Thus, if the payback of the modification to improve the process is long, it will not an attractive project to do. We need to find a balance between the immediate and long term development.
Personally, I think the job scope for our work can be separated into 2 aspects, i.e.
· Identifying improvement opportunities in the current process (i.e. the immediate “quick-wins”)
· Evaluation of new catalysts and gather info to design the new plant (i.e. the long term plan)
For the coming visit, I would like to walk through with you the entire Yuanda process to identify the issues first, e.g. reactor design, catalyst dosing, centrifuge, distillation capacity, etc.
Then we can discuss about the modifications required, prioritise these projects and develop an action plan/project schedule.
After that, we can discuss about the new catalysts, e.g. setup required for the trial, analytical methods needed, what kind of info do we need to collect for evaluation.
So, the visit will have a heavy agenda and I hope to give you as much background info as possible beforehand.
I am available for the telcon on Wednesday 16th of Nov. at 09:00 hrs (Dutch time).
I will get for reactor pressure profile before your visit. If there is anything else, please let me know so that I can prepare.
Regards
Koh Chen Ning
DID: (65) 65070 833