Case Study for Cost Efficient Vessel Calibration
The Challenge
The customer, a large Swedish producer of adhesives, had 13 vessels critical to the production process. The largest reactor had a capacity of 60 tons. They calibrated the vessels by filling with water – a very time consuming process with an added material cost. Calibration took one week per vessel. Besides the time needed for filling the tank with water, it must be emptied and rinsed. After calibration, it needed to dry completely before re-starting production.
The Solution
In close cooperation with the customer BLH Nobel developed a solution to lift-up the vessels, while being filled with the production ingredient to the maximum, and read the weight change at several steps during the process. We decided the equipment to be ours and used from time to time with a BLH Nobel service engineer.
The customer adapted the vessels legs to fit our equipment. This solution resulted in very short production downtime during calibration because there was no need of emptying the vessel of its contents. Calibration of one vessel could be reduced to 1-2 hours including preparation time, leaving the customer more than satisfied.
Force Calibration Sytem
The force calibration system used in this solution consists of a G4 Panel Mount Weight Indicator with 4 weighing channels (1 load cell per channel) and 3 to 4 load cells. The instrument displayed each channel and the total sum of the individual channels. Miniature flat hydraulic cylinders were used for lifting the load cells.
The instrument and load cells were co-calibrated in the BLH Nobel accredited laboratory in Sweden.