Does downtime for your air pollution control system mean a loss of production for your company? If your air pollution control device fails due to a component part failure, does your EPA permit require the plant to shut down operations until the oxidizer is repaired?

So you’ve reached compliance with your EPA operations permit. Your manufacturing is 100% online. Your team is happy to report that your regenerative thermal oxidizer (RTO) is fully commissioned and running better than expected. These are typical reactions to a Startup/Commissioning sequence on CPI projects. Now that the system is running and production is back to full speed the real question is this: What type of maintenance is required on the RTO? Over the next few months, we’ll be looking at the critical, yet often overlooked, requirements for keeping a quality CPI RTO online and running smoothly.

At Catalytic Products International, we work with a wide variety of clients to help them meet their air pollution control needs. While each client is different, our experience and expertise ensures that we are able to help them address and resolve the issues they experience. In this series of customer testimonial blogs, we’ll be sharing some of these success stories.

Oxidation, or combustion as it pertains to the air pollution control industry, can simply be defined as a rapid combination of oxygen with a fuel (in this case, a volatile organic compound, or VOC). This process will result in the release of energy in the form of heat and, if completed correctly in our world, the process will also release carbon dioxide and water. 

Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) is a term used in the air pollution control industry for the process of  selectively targeting a pollutant to remove that pollutant from an exhaust stream. The most common pollutant that is controlled through a SCR process is nitrogen oxide (NOx). While there are many catalysts that can selectively target a number of compounds, the content of this blog will focus on SCR technologies for the reduction of NOx. 

Any facility operator that consumes significant amounts of natural gas should understand the basics of heat recovery. Here at Catalytic Products International (CPI), we find ourselves engaged in energy conservation discussions with our existing and prospective customers several times each week. We felt that “Heat Recovery 101” may be a useful tool to help our readers fully understand some of the basics and economics about heat recovery solutions.

There are hundreds of types of catalyst products at work in the world today. This series will focus only on the use of precious metal catalysts used in air pollution control systems. The most traditional air pollution control device that employs a precious metal catalyst is a Catalytic Oxidizer. Although catalysts have been used in Regenerative Thermal Oxidizers as a means to lower the operating temperature and reduce natural gas consumption, they can also be installed in a catalytic reactor or catalyst bed where the pollutants are found in a pre-heated exhaust stream.

As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) develops new control technique guidelines, the definition of the RACT (Reasonably Available Control Technology) standards changes on a state level. 

Accurate measurement of airflow is a key part of properly sizing and selecting a new air pollution control device such as a thermal or catalytic oxidizer. Ongoing maintenance of existing thermal oxidizer’s should also include periodic air flow measurements. Usually, airflow measurement is a straightforward exercise, but special situations sometime occur that require alternatives. In this blog, we'll discuss the basics of airflow measurement and how to handle some problematic conditions.

Air quality regulation starts with National Ambient Air Quality Standards, more commonly known by the abbreviation NAAQS. The NAAQS represent the maximum concentration of each regulated pollutant that can be present in the air we breathe, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Each maximum concentration is chosen to fulfill the EPA’s mandate to protect human health and the environment.