The Monitor

All food and beverages undergo some form of processing, and those processes need to follow a variety of local, national and international food safety regulations. Buying certified samplers from authorized sellers is critical to ensuring your plant has the right sampling equipment to meet these standards and keep our food supply safe.

Yet many plants purchase sampling equipment outside manufacturers’ authorized distribution channels – also known as the grey market. According to the Harvard Business Review, an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion worth of products are sold every year in the United States outside these authorized channels. Most consumers and businesses buy items on the grey market because prices are generally lower.

But investing in these unauthorized products doesn’t give you the same peace of mind as those with genuine ones, and it could bring you back to square one both financially and in terms of inspection violations.

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Topics: Food & Beverage, Solids & Powder, Liquid & Slurry

 

When chemistry alarms go off in your steam power plant, how do you know if it’s just a nuisance alarm or a real chemical event?

The fact is, most of the time, you don’t. For many plant operators, too many alarms can be worse than none at all. And that confusion can cost you time and money during a real event.

Troubleshooting alarms with manual processes can take hours or even days to find the issue – costing up to $100,000 for every hour your operation is down, or millions if permanent damage occurs. Alarm-related problems cost U.S. industry more than $20 billion a year, driving many plants to reduce alarms and meet the International Society of Automation (ISA) standard of 1 alarm every 10 minutes.

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Topics: Power, Liquid & Slurry, Steam & Water

Plants and facilities of all kinds use sample coolers to cool a sample from a process stream. Cooling samples as part of your steam and water sampling system is essential to maintaining safety and the representativeness of the sample.

For example, if a sample in a power plant is too hot to handle, the operator might throttle the flow to unacceptably low levels, which means the sample is no longer representative or acceptable.

Another example comes from Hydrocarbon processing or Process Analytics. Cooling the process to handle the sample is necessary.   If you take a grab sample of a certain hydrocarbon whether it be of a liquid or a gas, the safest way is to handle the sample at below 140F.  This protects the operator when handling hot samples that need to be physically taken to the lab safely for analysis.   

In order to achieve accurate data, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), ASTM and ASME recommend cooling water samples to 77°F (25°C) to ensure consistent, accurate test results. 

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Topics: Power, Downstream, Upstream & Midstream, Liquid & Slurry, Steam & Water

 

Sampling in a hydrocarbon processing plant has its hazards. Tapping into a process line to extract a representative sample requires careful planning, specialized equipment and a partnership with the right hydrocarbon service team. Commonly, however, more focus is spent on the best and safest way to extract the sample, than the method to seal the sample collection bottle. That can be just as hazardous.

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Topics: Downstream, Upstream & Midstream, Liquid & Slurry

Our cars wouldn’t run very well if we didn’t fill them with gasoline, change the motor oil, or conduct routine maintenance and repairs. In the same way, your facility’s sampling equipment needs regular preventative maintenance.

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Topics: Cement, Food & Beverage, Downstream, Mining, Upstream & Midstream, Solids & Powder, Pharmaceutical, Liquid & Slurry, Any Application, Gas

The answer currently is 154. The leading brand of sample coolers – Sentry – supplies more than 6,000 per year to customers around the globe.

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Topics: Power, Cement, Food & Beverage, Downstream, Mining, Upstream & Midstream, Pharmaceutical, Liquid & Slurry, Any Application, Steam & Water, Gas

Sludges containing oil and water gradually build up on any relatively large ship as a byproduct of its operation of electrical generation machinery and the main propulsion engine. This oil sludge presents operators with issues of safe disposal in compliance with maritime environmental regulations.

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Topics: Upstream & Midstream, Liquid & Slurry

Manufacturing and quality control engineers across a variety of industries are faced with the daily challenge of maintaining regulatory compliance using questionable sample analysis results. This is especially true for pharmaceutical and other production environments where industrial waste volumes must be accurately characterized. Standard sampling practices, such as taking a repeatable sample from a good location, are just not enough for complete confidence in these environments.

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Topics: Pharmaceutical, Liquid & Slurry