Customers are welcoming the increased benefits they’re experiencing as MSA Safety and MSA Bacharach mark the second anniversary of the Bacharach acquisition. From enhanced customer service integration, insourced production, reduction in lead times, and engaged MSA Sales Channels to provide better customer support on a global scale, customers are seeing the value with these two gas detection leaders together as one.

Since the July 2021 acquisition, the company is serving a broader range of markets with MSA Safety’s and MSA Bacharach’s industry-leading gas detection measurement and monitoring tools. Together, this advances a joint mission focused on workplace safety.

“MSA is focused on providing innovative, quality safety products and technology solutions while improving operational efficiencies,” said Aaron Tufts, Chief Operating Officer of MSA Bacharach. “By integrating all Bacharach locations into the MSA Safety sales system, this has allowed for more direct customer communication and feedback. Additionally, by insourcing most of the production, including manufacturing, we’ve been able to reduce lead times.”

Within the past two years, the company has moved production in Ireland from Bacharach Dublin to more extensive MSA facilities in Galway, which has improved production output for the EMEA region and beyond. This has provided increased stock capacity to better serve the growing need for industry-leading refrigerant gas detection in the HVAC-R industry.

“Our plan is to have an improved stock program for all products, resulting in one-week delivery for our customers,” Tufts said. “At MSA, we are proud of our mission to help protect people at work, and we would like to express our sincere appreciation for our customers’ continued support and dedication to safeguarding people, places, and the planet.”

MSA Safety is celebrating World Refrigeration Day 2023 by providing next-generation cooling solutions that help safeguard people, places, and the planet. Industry-leading, low-level refrigerant leak detection combined with innovative cloud-based early notification and tracking systems provides an effective connected solution, bringing the future into your hands.

World Refrigeration Day is held every year on June 26^th. The day was created to raise awareness of the importance of refrigeration technologies, raise the air conditioning and refrigeration sector profile, and show how significant the industry and technology are for modern life. The day itself was chosen to celebrate the birthday of Lord Kelvin on June 26^th 1824.

The World Refrigeration Day 2023 theme, “Next Generation Cooling: The Future is in Our Hands”, provides a focus on the future of cooling technology, the industry, the people working within it, and those that benefit from cooling. More importantly, for a sustainable future, it’s essential also to consider the impact refrigeration has on the environment- or rather, the impact of refrigeration equipment leaking. That’s because the most common refrigerants in use—CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs—have environmentally harmful properties, such as ozone-depleting potential (ODP) and/or global warming potential (GWP). In essence, if these refrigerants leak, it harms the atmosphere. Interestingly, Project Drawdown, which lists refrigerant management as the #1 solution to global warming, states, “90 percent of refrigerant emissions happen at end of life.”

The MSA Safety solution to reducing refrigerant emissions combines industry-leading low-level leak detection equipment with innovative cloud-based software. This combination provides the MSA Connected Solution. The MSA Connected Solution provides live refrigerant leak alerts and notifications across your whole organization: all your refrigeration equipment across all your sites. This level of visibility and sophistication can help you drive down refrigerant emissions for assets and sites across your whole organization.

Sources:

[1] World Refrigeration Day official website (https://worldrefrigerationday.org/)

[2] Project Drawdown (https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/refrigerant-management)

[3] Refrigerant Emissions Reduction (https://www.mybacharach.com/solutions/refrigerant-emissions-reduction/)

Typically, when we think of inserting / tank blanketing a process vessel, we think of a tank containing some type of flammable substance with a vapor layer on top. The tank is then filled with an inert gas whereby reducing the risk of combustion. However, there are many instances when there are no flammable liquids or vapors, but simply a very fine combustible dust. Anybody who has created a small fire burst using non-dairy creamer and a lighter can relate to the potential for a fire in a larger scale. Other examples of the potential devastating effect of dust in fires of explosions are grain storage silos which on occasion will be shown on the nightly news. In this article we will explore how inserting can work to help preventing fires in vessels containing combustible dusts.

A large pharmaceutical manufacturer in the Northeast area of the US had 12 mixing hoppers used to combine components for a controlled type medication. The medication would then be packaged in capsules. The mixing hoppers were relatively small in size at about 25 gallons in volume, as they were designed to work in small batches, with a large number of them in the same working space. The batches were kept small to reduce risk in case a batch had to be rejected due to very exacting quality standards for the product.

Concern

The powder components were individually loaded into each hopper manually from bags. In order to accomplish this, the operators opened the top hatches to pour in the contents of the bag. Every time the hatches were opened, the vessel also filled up with air and caused a safety concern due to the presence of oxygen.

Each vessel was connected to a nitrogen line that would purge the headspace; however, the operators needed to know when the space was truly inerted so they could start the mixing process in safety. Nitrogen was supplied to the vessels on a time basis mode, with the time calculated to err well on the side of safety. If the inerting time could be shortened, the process could be expedited, and production increased.

Another concern was cost. The product was handled in small batches in different hoppers, but there were 20 of them operating at any single time to be able to keep up with production. Having a separate dedicated inerting system for each unit was not economically feasible. In addition, hoppers were filled sequentially, so not all of them had to be inerted at the same time.

Solution

The plant production group at the company determined that the most efficient, and safe way to handle inerting was to analyze the head space for oxygen and to stop nitrogen flow once the desired level was reached. This avoided the uncertainties of knowing exactly when each vessel was inerted. The fact that only one vessel had to be analyzed while it was actively being worked on, gave them the idea of using a portable type system that could be moved from vessel to vessel as needed.

MSA Gas Analysis engineers suggested and developed a full inerting control system mounted on a stainless-steel cart with wheels. The cart was equipped with a flexible hose that could be connected to a particular tank to draw a sample and determine if nitrogen still needed to be added into the vessel. It also had the sample conditioning package, oxygen sensor and analyzer on it. In addition, the cart was fitted with a set of warning lights that would alert the operator of the condition of the vessel: red indicating the inerting process was not complete and green indicating that the nitrogen intake could be shut off and the mixing process could start. Alarms were also added to provide additional warning/information to the operators.

Once the system was operational, operators would open the valve to the line feeding nitrogen into a vessel, fill it with the desired products from bags, close the hatch and connect the mobile analyzer to the hopper. When the analyzer indicated an inert status within the vessel, they would shut the nitrogen off, disconnect the analyzer and start the mixing process.

It is important to emphasize that the open hatch period during which the hopper is being filled is one of the most critical times from a combustion-safety perspective. Maintaining the proper flow of nitrogen during this time is critical since air is freely flowing in through the open hatch.

The plant team reported that the payback period for the system, considering the improvement in productivity was quick and measured in months, with the added benefits of enhanced combustion risk reduction. Improved revenue from production and a safer combustion-related process is a great combination.

Conclusion

The use of an analyzer-based oxygen inerting system proved to be a win-win for the customer. It allowed them to, first and foremost, ensure that combustion risk was always contained by keeping oxygen levels below the necessary threshold to avoid the chance of combustion. In addition, the customer achieved the additional improvement in its production rates with a quick payback on the investment in equipment.

The mobile analyzer cart that was designed for this customer by our application engineers, shows the ingenuity, capability and level of customization that MSA can offer to achieve a customer centric solution.

MSA industrial process analysis experts are available to help in a variety of applications. For assistance, provide project details at myBacharach.com/GAsurvey and one of our application engineers will discuss ways to optimize your process.