Bag Leak Detection Blog

In December, the EPA reached consent agreements stemming from Clean Air Act claims with 3 major carbon black manufacturers, where the plants agreed to invest $300 million collectively in state-of-the-art pollution control technologies. This resolution once again reinforced the importance of reliable particulate emission monitoring technology. Although carbon black stacks and baghouse dust collectors are some of the most challenging applications, carbon black manufacturers have been using Auburn FilterSense continuous particulate emission monitoring systems for years to help improve production and proactively stay in compliance and avoid fines.

In today's world, plant personnel are increasingly tasked with keeping particulate emissions as low as possible while both complying with EPA and local regulations and minimizing baghouse downtime and maintenance expenses. Often, we hear from our customers about the inability to do so efficiently and the difficulty their facilities have committing resources to proactively manage and optimize their baghouse environment - resulting in wasted time and unexpected maintenance costs.

While baghouse compliance and management can be a frustrating endeavor, here are 3 ways that using baghouse controls, such as Auburn FilterSense's Baghouse Performance and Analysis Controls (B-PAC), has helped many companies satisfy regulatory requirements while also increasing baghouse efficiencies:

Particle Speed, not Air Speed!

Pneumatic conveying plays a large role in many industrial processes across many industries. From batch mixing and manufacturing, to fuel feed rates for boilers and furnaces, pneumatic conveying controls must be set correctly or else serious complications can arise leading to loss of product, damage to equipment or even potential safety or emissions violations.

Recently, Auburn Systems has had great success integrating their triboelectric particulate monitoring solutions directly with pneumatic conveying system controls to dynamically adjust fan settings to increase/decrease air flow and velocity through the processes. This can be done by measuring actual particle speed with the TRIBO.hs 5000 particle velocity monitoring series. Let’s examine a few of these advantages.

Advantage #1 - Automate Control Settings to Respond to Process Changes

 Air material separators - critical for dust collection and recirculation

Despite the well know dangers associated with combustible dust hazards there exist few specific OSHA/MSHA regulations covering them outside of a handful of specific industries (e.g. grain elevators) on a national level. Rather, local jurisdictions normally base their regulations on the guidelines found in the National Fire Protection Agency standards that outline best practice for eliminating or controlling these hazards.

The most widely used NFPA standard for combustible dust is NFPA 654 - Standard for the Prevention of Fire and Dust Explosions from the Manufacturing, Processing, and Handling of Combustible Particulate Solids.  This standard contains guidance that is applicable to most combustible dusts in general industry and is attracting new attention based on updates to the regulations around recirculating air from dust collectors and combustible dust monitoring.