SELECTED PROJECTS
Twelve years of nitric acid plants — diagnosed, designed, revamped and supplied.
Every project below is described the way another plant would want to read it: what the problem was, what we changed, and what it did to the energy balance.
SINCE 2014
The thread that runs through all of it
Since 2014 ARCET has handled process catalyst procurement for a large number of nitric acid plants. That work was never only purchasing.
Every campaign arrived with its own problem — a gauze burning unevenly across the basket, a DeNOx bed losing activity faster than it should, a plant that could not hold its permit through start-up. Solving those meant going back into the catalyst design itself: pack composition, bed geometry, and the operating window the catalyst had been specified against in the first place.
That is where the rest of this page comes from. Twelve years of watching what actually happens on the gauze, in plants we did not build, is why we now design the plant around it.
PROJECT RECORD
Selected projects
Tail-gas DeNOx systems — design, procurement and manufacturing
Delivered on more than one line. Scope covered the DeNOx catalyst, the reactor module and its vessel, through commissioning and operator training.
Completed
Plant fault diagnosis
A recurring problem the operator had not been able to close. We rebuilt the whole flowsheet from the plant's own data — process flow, heat balance and material balance — and traced the fault to its source rather than to its symptoms.
Completed
Revamp and upgrade engineering for capacity increase
Converter internals, expander gas heater, N₂O and NOx abatement, and colourless start-up and shutdown.
Completed
Platinum recovery filtration — design, procurement and manufacturing
Vessel and filter mesh within scope, delivered through commissioning and operator training.
Completed
Licence and proprietary equipment — 40% capacity increase
Reactor, expander gas heater, N₂O and NOx abatement combined in a single vessel, and colourless start-up and shutdown. Commissioning and training included.
In progress
Reactor replacement study — capacity and N₂O together
Feasibility for a reactor change serving a capacity increase and N₂O abatement at once, framed by the operator's corporate zero-carbon target.
Completed
Relocation, refurbishment and revamp with capacity increase
Full scope through installation and commissioning, continuing into supervision of plant management after start-up.
In progress
Greenfield ammonium nitrate plant — EPCM
Appointed as EPCM contractor for a new ammonium nitrate plant from greenfield. Basic engineering is under way.
In progress
WHAT THE LIST IS SAYING
Read down the scope column
Diagnosis. Engineering study. Licence. Proprietary equipment. Catalyst supply. Relocation. Installation. Commissioning. Plant management. All in one list, for one plant type.
Most companies in this business do one of those things. Doing all of them changes where the engineering starts — because the same people who draw the heat balance are the ones standing in the control room at start-up, having to make the number true.
It is also why we resist selling a configuration before seeing a plant's data. The cheap answer and the right answer are rarely the same, and only one of them is still cheap in year five.
The same record, read as scope rather than as dates. Every row is drawn from the projects listed above.
YOUR PLANT
Send us the data, not the specification
Current operating rates, consumptions, tail-gas conditions and the limit you have to meet are enough for us to come back with a configuration and an honest view of what it costs you in energy.