Refrigerant Quality Analysis Helps Troubleshoot Underperforming Critical Refinery System
At a Glance
The customer is a leading supplier, distributor, transporter, and retailer of petroleum and associated products in Australia. To effectively serve its extensive customer base across Australia, it must efficiently manage and operate its diverse infrastructure network.
At one of their key high-risk infrastructure sites, the customer was experiencing severe performance issues with a critical operational system containing a nine-tonne charge of high global warming potential (GWP) and ozone-depleting refrigerant gas. After ruling out other factors, it needed to identify whether the refrigerant was contaminated.
The customer needed the gas recovered safely to avoid the release of gas into the atmosphere. Additionally, the customer wanted to verify the amount of refrigerant in the system to assess any loss from potential system leaks.
Challenges
- Supporting the customer with resolving its system operating problems.
- Accurately verifying the amount of refrigerant to measure potential losses.
- Recovering refrigerant with a high global warming potential at a high-risk site, while preventing its release into the atmosphere.
Benefits
- Thorough analysis of system fluids revealed refrigerant and oil complied with AHRI 700 standards, avoiding the need to replace a significant amount of refrigerant.
- Extending the lifecycle of the refrigerant, providing cost savings.
- Safe recovery of high GWP refrigerant, preventing its release into atmosphere.
Using both our Rapid Recovery and custom-designed REFRIG HEAL+H CHECK tools, A-Gas successfully recovered and analysed the customer’s refrigerant, meeting their complex needs. This mobile and high-speed equipment included 75-metre-long hoses and pump-down cylinders, ensuring that all stages of the process were handled efficiently and in a responsible way.
Our laboratory analysis confirmed that the customer’s refrigerant met all AHRI 700 specifications, meaning that there was no need to replace the system’s refrigerant. It also provided the customer with substantial cost savings.
By gaining insight into the quality of fluids circulating through its critical system, the client achieved substantial cost savings and effectively ruled out contaminated system fluids as a concern, while exploring alternative potential causes.
Read the Full Case Study
Refrigerant quality analysis validates conformance to AHRI 700 Standard in critical refinery system.
