About Me & Plant Engineering

Hi There!!!

I am Sumana, a mechanical Engineer with approx. 15 years of experience in the field of plant design engineering. Plant design engineering includes basic design engineering of plant and detailed engineering. Here in this blog, I would like to share my experiences & knowledge with you. Before starting, let me explain in brief, basic design engineering & detail engineering for you.

Basic Design Engineering

Once the concept has been evaluated or selected and the technical scope of plant is determined, Basic engineering comes into picture. All expected costs and expenses are evaluated in basic engineering.

Basic engineering starts with a basic flow diagram which represents the process engineering procedure of the plant. The input, chemicals, reactants & output are defined. Then they are assigned to their corresponding equipments for storage or reaction or for any other process. The types of equipments and sequence of basic process operations are determined. Basic flow diagram is the main skeleton of the project and generally is created by the Owner itself.

Then the next level is to create the Process Flow Diagram (PFD) based on basic flow diagram. All essential component requirements like Pumps, compressors, heat exchangers, tanks, working/standby philosophy, the services requirement like water, steam, air etc. are decided at this level. The major heat and mass balance are done at this level.

The preparation of Major Equipments' specifications for the RFQs can be prepared after this level i.e based on PFDs. PFD helps for the estimation / Budget of the project.

The next higher & the final step is to prepare Process and Instrumentation diagram (P&ID) which shows each & every process detail, process requirements, equipment details, piping connections, instrument requirements and control philosophy. The detailed heat & mass balance calculations, equipment sizing, pipe sizing, pressure drop calculations are done at this stage. The equipment specifications, piping material specifications, instrument specifications are finalised at this stage.

Detail Engineering

The biggest contribution to the project is made by detailed engineering. The important activities during detailed engineering are selection of Equipments / finalisation of vendors, preparation & finalisation of Equipment layouts,  Optimisation, Piping layouts, Pressure vessel / tank design & detail engineering, finalising Structure / platform requirements, Structural detail engineering, pipe detailing, support detailing, E&I technology etc.

Detail engineering is highly multidisciplinary activities taht involves many specialists to complete each packages in detail. The multidisciplinary activities are interdependent and are also carried out parallalely which require lots of to & fro communications / discussions. Hence, good co-ordination, interdisciplinary communications & technical understanding are few of the important aspects for carrying out detail engineering of the Plant.

Another important task of detail engineering team is to solve all the problems that client come across during the erection of the plant which may include some interface issues, material unavailability etc.

Similarly the basic engineering team needs to support during the commissioning stage.