14 November 2006

Summertime at Monckton Ltd.

Adam Awang Draup, a 4th year Chemical Engineering MEng student, has spent the last two summers working for a company called Monckton Coke & Chemical Company. He gained lots of valuable practical chemical engineering experience while earning money during his summer holiday.

The Monckton Coke & Chemical Company is a coke production site based in Royston near Barnsley, South Yorkshire. It is part of the Hargreaves (UK) Holdings group of companies. Monckton are one of Europe’s largest suppliers of metallurgical coke which is supplied to both industrial and domestic markets.

Coke is produced on site by high temperature carbonisation, a process of heating coal to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. This process produces a coal of high carbon content for use as a high energy smokeless fuel. By-products of benzole, tar and ammoniacal liquor present in the coke oven gas from the ovens is removed. The waste liquor is sent to the on site water treatment facility. Oven heating is a self-sufficient process as it uses the coke oven gas that is produced during the carbonisation process as fuel. The excess coke oven gas is used as fuel for the on-site Combined Heat and Power (CHP) unit, which generates electricity for the plant and also exports to the national grid.

I started working for Monckton during the summers after my 2nd and 3rd years at university. During my first placement I was assigned a heat exchange project. The company intended to cool a higher throughput of an effluent stream for treatment. They also wanted to determine whether it was possible to utilise the existing cooling towers to do this. I carried out the feasibility study and then proposed different design set-ups for the heat exchange system. A cost-benefit analysis was done as well where I required a little more help in terms of costing the equipment. The experience was very good preparation towards the design project module I had to do in the 3rd year. When I returned to work during the second summer, I was surprised to be told that my design had been fabricated and installed on site. To top it all off, I was invited to take part in commissioning the installation as well. It was nerve wracking experience knowing that the company had invested in my design so it had better work! I can’t say how proud I felt when I finally switched on the valves and saw it working properly for the first time. I can say that I had a big beaming smile on my face for the rest of the day.

During my second placement I was placed at the heart of the process working with the heater team to investigate the heating efficiency of the battery ovens. Working on top and underneath the ovens was a bit daunting at first with the heat and certainly an experience. It was the best way to understand the oven operation, monitoring and maintenance. I worked under supervision taking measurements and readings and helped out in some of the maintenance work. The heating efficiency investigation is ongoing and revolved around balancing gas pressures in a ring manifold, cleaning, maintenance of the oven walls and burners to maintain the correct heating of each oven. I was involved in other smaller projects as well such as creating survey charts, organising oven wall maintenance records for presentation and also created dip charts for some new horizontal storage tanks.

The overall experience was a very enjoyable and valuable one for me. The most important thing I learnt was to trust in my own abilities and it built up my confidence in my own work. I also experienced both office-oriented and hands-on styles of working. My colleagues were some very accommodating, patient and friendly people and were great to work alongside. I would recommend anyone to have the chance to do a placement with Monckton. The only warning I would give is that you may get hot and dirty, but I think that’s the fun side of it.