Plant upgrade wins design award

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Aug 22, 2005

Projen, a leading project management company, has won a 2005 BE Award for its glass condenser replacement project for GlaxoSmithKline in the UK.

Projen, a leading project management company, has won a 2005 BE Award for its glass condenser replacement project for GlaxoSmithKline in the UK.

The award category was "Plant: new technology adoption".

Projen used Bentley software to help upgrade core equipment in an existing research and development centre, increasing safety and protecting plant uptime.

The BE Awards of Excellence, which are selected by an independent jury of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during the annual BE conference, honour the work of Bentley users improving the world's infrastructure.

These projects set benchmarks for their industries, and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organisations that created them.

According to David Berry, Projen Mechanical Project Manager, the use of Bentley software played an important role in meeting the difficult demands of this project.

Said Berry: "The use of Autoplant and other Bentley plant applications allowed Projen to define and deliver a technically complex project using multidisciplined contractors, working in a confined work area, safely, on time, and within budget".

Projen's GlaxoSmithKline condenser project involved the replacement of forty 12-year-old glass condensers tightly housed in nine chemistry pilot plant (CPP) modules.

The modules are located in an R and D facility that provides more than half of the company's pilot plant capacity of drug substance used for clinical trial.

A failure of the aging glass coils in any of the condensers would have caused heat transfer fluid, a flammable irritant, to spill into the CPP's containment system, forcing the plant to shut down for up to two weeks.

This, in turn, would have slowed processing at the plant, delayed chemistry projects, and disrupted production schedules, resulting in significant financial loss.

Projen's assignment was to replace the condensers with units that are safer, more robust in design, and fabricated from Hastelloy and tantalum.

The new condensers would enable the company to achieve the required safety, environmental, and business protection needed to ensure the continued production of new chemical entities.

The piping and layout arrangement in the modules is complex, space is at a premium, and a lot of equipment and piping had to be temporarily moved.

In addition, the majority of the piping is made of glass and had been produced by a specialised manufacturer.

As a result, it wasn't included in any of the standard catalogues.

Within three weeks, the Bentley plant application engineers in Manchester were able to develop and produce from scratch a new glass piping bill of materials and specification.

"Without such a response from Bentley", said Berry, "it would have been impossible to complete the project within the limited time available, or to have delivered the glassware's detailed isometrics to the manufacturers on time".

Autoplant was used to generate detailed isometric drawings of the pipe routes.

The model generated proved to be accurate to within a few millimeters, minimising rework of pipe spools and components.

The Projen project team also needed to complete an as-built survey.

A digital photogrammetric approach was used to develop 3D models of the modules using dedicated software and Autoplant.

The models aided visualisation of the demolition and construction, as well as communication among the stakeholders.