Idea Transcript
A study in
contrasts
COADE Inc., USA, reports on India as it improves its infrastructure and prepares to become a global economy.
W
henever one thinks about or visits India, one cannot help but be confronted with the enormity of the task that successive Indian governments have set themselves: to improve its ageing infrastructure and make their country a global player in the supply of the goods and talent for which the world hungers. As the 20th century came to a close, India had become synonymous with call centres, outsourcing and cheap labour, as many global organisations tapped into India’s talented pool of highly educated and motivated young people. The country has over 1.2 billion people locked within a landmass that is only a third the size of the USA, a country that supports only 25% of the population of India. In India, 40% of the citizens are under 15 years of age, and 70% of the population lives in over 500 000 rural villages. The remainder of approximately 360 million live in industrialised major towns and cities.
Figure 1. Sand dunes in the Thar desert, Rajasthan, India.
Winds of change As international companies poured money and resources into the country, the competition for these resources drove up the cost of doing business in India. With this also came higher wages for workers and expectations of higher standards of living and quality of life. As record numbers of Indians swapped their motorcycles for cars to travel to and from work, this placed enormous strains on India’s fragile infrastructure and valuable resources, especially in the cities and towns. The Indian federal and state governments knew that if they wanted to alleviate the strain on city infrastructure and respond to the spiralling demand for office and living accommodation caused by this growth, they would have to supply services from outside the traditional urban hubs of Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Delhi. If they were to remain competitive for the long haul, they would have to develop infrastructure to allow 21st century goods and services to be supplied from the outlying towns and villages, where over 80% of the population currently lives.
From call centres to centres of excellence As the 21st century dawned, there was a marked shift in the economies of scale that India brought to the world market. The first shift was the demand on engineering companies to develop and supply goods for the improvement of India’s now declining infrastructure. The second shift was that global
companies were now paying more for the same work. For that extra money, global clients now demanded improved quality and output of deliverables from their Indian suppliers. The third shift was that, just like in the rest of the world, experienced engineers in India were leaving the industry and being replaced by the tens of thousand of graduate engineers pouring out of the country’s universities.
Keys to success It was in this environment that Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd (Godrej) developed and grew into the highly successful global manufacturer and supplier of goods for both domestic and international markets that it is today. Based in Mumbai in the southwestern state of Maharashtra, Godrej started life as a lock and security company in 1897, while India was still under British rule. As the years went by, Godrej continued to identify market areas in which it thought that it could offer true value, as well as become a world leader and best in class. Hence, it subsequently grew from a lock company to a manufacturer and supplier of a broad and diverse array of goods, ranging from soaps and beauty products, to home appliances such as refrigerators and washing machines, and from electronic and electrical goods and services to materials handling and process equipment. Today, Godrej is a domestic and international powerhouse with revenues of over US$ 2 billion and a client list that would be the envy of any corporation. Of all of the divisions that make up the Godrej Group, one division stands out that has gained significant international acclaim and continued global success, Godrej’s Process Equipment Division.
Leadership role
Figure 2. At 47.7 m long, 5.5 m dia. and weighing in at 800 t, this polypropylene reactor, built for Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), is the largest single unit fabricated by Godrej PED.
Figure 3. At only 1.3 m in length and 356 mm ID, these U3 stamped high pressure sand separators with 150 mm thick walls weigh over 1.3 t each.
Reprinted from HydrocarbonEngineering
Established in 1976, the Godrej Process Equipment Division (Godrej PED) manufactures custom built critical process equipment for end users in the refining, petrochemical, fertiliser, oil and gas, chemicals, pharmaceutical and power industries. In the beginning, Godrej PED began by manufacturing trays for distillation and fractionating columns. As needs grew and clients became ever more impressed with the work that Godrej PED delivered, the company began to design and manufacture a wide range of equipment, such as columns, reactors, pressure vessels, heat exchangers, trays and tower internals, skid mounted assemblies and various types of custom built equipment using various metals, process situations and global engineering standards. Godrej PED is now an ISO 9001 - 2000 company accredited with ASME U, U2, U3, S and R stamps, Chinese SELO manufacturing license and AD-Merkblatt HP-0 certification. To qualify as a global supplier of process equipment, the company has integrated its business processes and the BaaN ERP system that, together with PRIMAVERA aided project management, now forms the backbone of daily operations. To provide engineering designs to international standards, the company uses PV Elite and CodeCalc software for pressure vessel and exchanger design and analysis from COADE Engineering Software, based in Houston, Texas, and I-Deas for finite element and fatigue analysis.
A sizeable task It was with this background and tool set that Godrej worked on the largest single piece of equipment ever undertaken by
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the company, weighing in at 800 t, to be designed, fabricated and shipped out of the Mumbai port, as a single unit. This polypropylene reactor was to be built for the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation’s (SABIC) Ibn Zahr PP‑III Project, Jubail Industrial City (AKA Jubayl Industrial City), Saudi Arabia. Jubail Industrial City sits on the former sand dunes and salt flats north of old Jubail. The city is Saudi Arabia’s largest industrial centre and provides a livelihood for nearly 170 000 residents through over 160 industrial enterprises. Jubail has great historical significance for both Saudi Arabia and the world, as in the early 1930s, oil explorers first landed on the shores of Al Jubail in search of oil. The rest, as they say, is history.
was also carried out for six product discharge nozzles for local loads and moments with maximum loads and two sets of cyclic loads. Inspection and testing of the reactor involved the use of UT examination by time of flight diffraction (TOFD) method. The polypropylene reactor, which was based on Dow Chemical’s technology, measured 47.7 m in height and 5.5 m inside diameter from the base up to a 9 m diameter dome that caps the top of the reactor. The shell thicknesses ranged from 84 - 105 mm and Godrej PED’s brief was to design, manufacture, supply and test the unit to ASME U2‑Stamp standards.
Project scope
As with every new job, there are unique challenges that test the ingenuity of the workforce and the tools that they choose to use. In this case, the sheer size and weight and the dome topped design of the unit presented Godrej PED with the task of ensuring they used the right tools for the job. Godrej knew that the tools that they used should provide as many local design, wind and seismic codes as possible. The selection of PV Elite, with its comprehensive list of international codes and standards, allows the company to design equipment for any place on the globe to local standards and to do so with the benefit of learning only one package.
For this job, calculations were carried out by PV Elite software, which also provided the code and mechanical design calculations and inputs for fabrication drawings. ANSYS software was used for fatigue analysis of the complete vessel for pressure cycles, from 3.52 MPa at 69 ˚C, to 0 MPa at 0 ˚C for 520 cycles during its life. A detailed finite element analysis Godrej PED specifications Mechanical design codes ASME Sec. I ASME Sec. VIII Div. 1 ASME Sec. VIII Div. 2 ASME Sec. VIII Div. 3 ASME B 31.3
A global supplier
Designing for local conditions When the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is mentioned, thoughts of blistering heat, sand and oil come to mind but, more importantly, wind and seismic conditions have to be taken
European Pressure Equipment Directive API 660 IS 2825 PD 5500 AD Merkblatter TEMA EJMA IBR / ISO 931 AS 1210 DNV Class 1 vessels (marine application) Defined Local Code Regulations Memberships and certifications ISO 9001 - 2000 by Lloyds Register Quality Assurance
Figure 4. Units such as this 31 t high pressure heat exchanger, destined for the UK, need to be designed and built to exacting standards.
'U', 'U2', 'U3' and ‘S’ Stamps by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) 'R' and 'NB' Stamp by the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors (NBBI) Chinese SELO Certification Member of Process Plant & Machinery Association of India Member of Heat Transfer Research Institute (HTRI), USA Member of TWI Welding Research Institute, UK Workshop capacity up to: 9.5 m diameter 100 m length 250 mm thickness (shell rolling) Single piece equipment weighing 1400 million t Tubesheet deep hole drilling capacity up to 1000 mm thick
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Figure 5. This USA bound 665 t, 41.5 m long and 3.3 m dia. carbon steel reactor with 153 mm walls is made more cost effective by being weld overlaid with stainless steel strip cladding.
Reprinted from January2009
HydrocarbonEngineering
into account when designing equipment like the reactor that Godrej PED manufactured for Jubail Industrial City. The Arabian peninsular is victim of two main seasonal storms; from the south is the ‘kauf’ which brings with it strong winds, high humidity and temperature. In spring, the strong northwesterly ‘shamal’ takes hold, producing severe winds and blinding sand storms that can continue for up to three months. Also on the seismic side, Jubail sits just on the Persian Gulf across from the rocky coastline of Iran. It is the Iranian coastline that marks the Zagros earthquake zone where the Arabian geological plate dives under the Eurasian plate. The Zagros zone has seen many quakes that, although lower in intensity than on the Saudi Arabian Red Sea coast, the possibility and intensity of such quakes must still be taken into account when designing a vessel of such great mass and with a large proportion of that mass concentrated in the 9 m domed section 38 m above the base of the vessel. This is where COADE’s PV Elite software has greatly benefited Godrej PED, in that all aspects of the vessel’s design, from operations to external boundary conditions such as wind and seismic, can be taken into account to produce a safe and viable piece of equipment.
Tools for global delivery All vessels are designed to take into account their operating conditions. But, with such large vessels and towers, Godrej PED also has to consider the lifting, loading and transportation forces on the equipment. Even if the design conditions show the equipment to be strong enough, analysis still has to be carried out to determine what loads will be present during
Reprinted from HydrocarbonEngineering
transportation and what supports are needed to ensure the integrity and acceptance of the vessel once delivered. In these cases, PV Elite makes the task of determining the transportation loads and ideal support positions much easier, as it allows the engineer to flip the vessel from the vertical design to horizontal transportation orientation and to do so without the engineer redesigning the equipment, as is often required with other approaches. This is important as even the smallest crease in the shell of these tall towers, due to inaccurate transportation load analysis and supporting could cause a catastrophic failure during operations.
Conclusion Godrej PED relies heavily on COADE’s solutions because it is aware that packages such as PV Elite and CodeCalc have the ability to carry out pressure vessel and exchanger calculations to ASME Sec. VIII Div 1 Div. 2, British and EN codes and many others. The ease of use, combined with the Microsoft Windows interface guides the user across various calculations modules, all done seamlessly. PV Elite has helped Godrej PED to deliver what the client requires, and its use has resulted in significant reductions in the time taken to prepare the code calculations and the essential wind and seismic analyses of such complex equipment for a broad range of users. One other noted benefit is that, because of PV Elite’s accuracy and speed of use, Godrej PED is able to rely on it to prepare accurate information for bids for almost any region of the globe. This has improved Godrej PED’s possibilities for growth and increased the company’s list of satisfied customers and with it, led to repeat business that fuels even more growth.
January2009
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