Overview

Great Lakes Chemical Corporation is a global company that develops and delivers specialty chemical solutions that treat and purify water, eliminate germs and contaminants, help protect against and extinguish fire, and make consumer products – from computers and electronics to automobile components and packaging – perform better.

John Pietranski, Engineer at the Great Lakes Chemical Plant in El Dorado, AR, has used both PIPE-FLO Professional and Compressible on a variety of projects to assist in both the design and troubleshooting of the plants piping systems. Combined, the three Great Lakes Chemical Arkansas plants have 750 employees that produce pure bromine used in the pharmaceutical and flame retardant industries.

The Challenge

As the lone engineer on many of the plants projects, John had to balance a number of duties and there was not always time to complete many of the design and validation calculations that would save the company money. Many of the calculations that John needed to do were too complicated and too time consuming to be done manually.

PIPE-FLO's Solution

Using PIPE-FLO, John was able to complete complicated validation and balancing calculations that he previously would not have had the time to complete. Prior to using PIPE-FLO, John would make an educated guess at what was needed and then include a margin of error in his design. This was costing Great Lakes Chemical capital.

"Before using PIPE-FLO, we would have spent capital money to save engineering time," Pietranski said.

"I purchased the program because I had a project that included 5,000 feet of pipe with a series of pipes leading into it. We wanted to balance the system, but I was working on 5 other projects and there was no time to do it manually. With PIPE-FLO I was able to balance the system quickly and accurately," Pietranski said.

"Before PIPE-FLO we would never have even tried to balance the flows in the network. It would have taken valuable time, and there is also a problem with accuracy. In fact, I don’t even know if we could have done it manually," Pietranski added.

Great Lakes Chemical has also used to program to ensure that additions to their systems were designed correctly.

"We were trying to balance 4 tanks that had conservation vents. We put the system in PIPE-FLO as it was designed and ran a calculation. When we did the simulation we found that we had a reverse flow. If we hadn’t used PIPE-FLO, we probably would have built it the wrong way. PIPE-FLO saved us from making a big mistake," Pietranski said.

Ease of use is also important to Great Lakes Chemical. "Using the copy and paste feature is a huge timesaver. The program is very easy to use. The colors make it very easy to see what is going on. After we run the calculation, if we see a red or blue line, we know we have a problem. It is great for troubleshooting and reaffirming what we are doing," Pietranski added.