As we announced in March, BHS has acquired AVA-GmbH. The AVA technologies provide for turbulent mixing, reacting and drying of wet cakes as well as powders and process slurries. The vertical and horizontal technologies are vacuum or atmospheric, batch and continuous, for final drying to “bone-dry” powders. They are an essential part of our “Continuum Approach.”
What do I mean by that? This blog briefly reviews our first ground-breaking study showing the benefits of a “Continuum Approach” to final drying and upstream solid-liquid filtration, cake washing and dewatering.
Most often when analyzing a new process development approach, engineers take a “silo” approach and look at each step independently. Our article illustrates that by taking a holistic approach and looking at each step not individually but as a continuum, the process solution becomes much more efficient.
In the manufacturing of the specialty chemical involved, the crystals coming from the reactor in a methanol slurry had to be filtered, washed and dewatered and then dried to a final moisture of less than 1.0 (<1.0 %). The standard approach would be to first look at the solid-liquid filtration step and optimize this step for the maximum washing and drying efficiency. Then, with this information, we’d optimize the downstream drying. The operating company, however, took a different approach and looked at the process as a continuum from solid-liquid filtration through cake washing and dewatering to final drying. The Continuum Approach” resulted in operational energy and nitrogen savings as well as lower capital and installation costs for a more efficient and reliable process.
You can read the full technical article, but the overall result was a 50% decrease in the filtration area, elimination of a nitrogen recovery system with a 30 minute increase in batch drying time at a lower temperature for better product quality.
Contact me to optimize your current drying and filtration process. Let’s get more efficient together!