A video on why checkerwalls collapse and how angled hoods turn a wall into a tool for mixing and residence time.
A checkerwall that only stays standing does half its job.
The other half is what it does to the gas.
The video on the science behind VectorWall explains how Blasch moved from a checkerwall that survives to one that controls the flow. Brick, matrix and cylinder checkerwalls collapse in hot, chemically aggressive reaction furnaces; the mortar free HexWall solved that, and the VectorWall adds patented vectoring hoods that steer the gas leaving each opening, so mixing, residence time and pressure drop can be designed instead of left to chance.
Why conventional walls fail: brick walls with mortar, matrix walls and stacked cylinders sit in an intense, high temperature, chemically laden gas stream. Mortar cracks under thermal cycling, and the walls collapse, which disrupts throughput and forces unplanned work.
The HexWall step: hexagonal blocks interlock on every side and are stacked without mortar, so the wall can expand and contract without collapsing. The round openings make the unsupported part of each block an arch, loaded in compression rather than tension.
The VectorWall step: a vectoring hood set into each opening turns the gas as it leaves the wall. Where a conventional checkerwall hardly affects the flow behind it, the hoods can create different patterns: a single helix that keeps mixed phases together, a dual helix for mixing across the whole chamber, or hoods that alternate row by row for a high shear rate.
Blasch has worked with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on computational fluid dynamics and reaction kinetics, run on a university supercomputer, to predict how a given wall layout changes a Claus furnace. The aim is a wall configuration chosen for each furnace rather than one standard pattern.
The design rule behind it is the old one for combustion: time, temperature and turbulence. A rotating flow gives the gas a longer path and a narrower spread of residence times, close to a plug flow reactor.
Once the wall stops falling down, it becomes the one part of the furnace that every molecule has to pass, and that makes it the best place to decide how the gas mixes.
If you replace a checkerwall, choke ring or baffle wall, the video gives you the questions to ask beyond service life: which flow pattern does the furnace need, where does the ammonia or BTEX have to be destroyed, and what pressure drop can the unit afford?
The product data are on the page for the VectorWall mixing checkerwall, the base wall on the page for the HexWall interlocking checkerwall. How the blocks go in is shown in the VectorWall installation video.
HexWall is the mortar free wall of interlocking hexagonal blocks. VectorWall is a HexWall with vectoring hoods in the openings that steer the gas flow.
Claus reaction furnaces in sulfur recovery units, tail gas incinerators and thermal oxidizers, sulfur burning furnaces and spent acid regeneration furnaces.
DuPont MECS is the exclusive distributor of HexWall and VectorWall for sulfuric acid plants and spent acid regeneration units worldwide.
Send the furnace diameter, the feed and what limits the unit today. A Blasch engineer proposes a wall configuration.
