Company offers compliance solutions for foundries

Air pollution engineering solutions company About Air Pollution offers the foundry industry solutions that ensure emission regulatory compliance.

“We are a respected equipment supplier that ensures the ongoing successful application for an air emissions licence,” says project manager Theunis Post.

“In the past ten years, air pollution authorities in South Africa have taken a close look at the foundry industry as potential high emitters of particulate matter and gaseous contamination. Owing to the high-temperature smelting of metals, the possibility of emitting large amounts of fossil fuels is highly likely. ”

Consequently, regulators have focused on this industry and implemented stringent strategies to reduce the emissions from the foundries.

Post highlights that the company assists foundries in completing assessments regarding air pollutant challenges. Foundries conducting these assessments ensures that the foundries adhere to statutory compliance.

The company has successfully completed assessments for foundries Castle Lead, in Krugersdorp, and Fry’s Metals, in Germiston.

Post points out that the foundry industry’s being diverse and having its own individual mix of ferro and nonferro components makes each entity unique in the emissions-control philosophy, presenting a challenge to equipment suppliers.

“We cater for all the potential problems related to foundry emissions such as particulate matter, sulphur oxide, nitrogen oxide (NOx) and any other gas emitted during the foundry process,” he says.

Post says removing nitric oxide from the air using some of the traditional methodologies, such as venturi and mist scrubbers using water as the solvent only has been complex and difficult.

As such, the company’s packed bed scrubbers are employed to remove NOx from gas streams successfully, but it usually requires more than one scrubber and a dwell time for as long as possible in the scrubber.

“The basic operation of a scrubber is to enable the gas stream to interact with a solvent and, by absorption and/or adsorption, to enable the gas particulates to become part of the solvent stream.”

Traditionally, the foundary industry has used water as the solvent for most of the scrubbing, but nitric oxide gas has very low solubility in water: 7.38 mℓ to 100 mℓ water at 0 ºC, 4.6 mℓ to 100 mℓ water at 20 ºC and 2.37 mℓ to 100 mℓ water at 60 ºC.

This has posed various challenges for chemists and engineers to postulate the best solution to overcome this solubility challenge, explains Post.

“At About Air Pollution, we consider a client’s unique set of circumstances by engineering a solution for your NOx challenge. “We can manufacture a scrubber from any material that would be suitable for your application and pride ourselves in offering solutions and not only in selling equipment,” he concludes.