Company

“Aspen Aerogels® provides thermal management and energy conservation insulation solutions for a variety of industries. Our insulation products provide up to five times better thermal performance than traditional insulation materials.” — From Jigsaw

Description

Aspen Aerogels was faced with a substantial scale up of their pilot manufacturing operation while working under severe schedule constraints in order to hit performance targets for their investors.  The effort involved developing process improvements, the development of custom process equipment and the relocation to a facility that was 5 times the size of the pilot operation.

Project

SPEC involvement began on the Process Flow Diagram (PFD) development level, included site selection and town approval and continued through eventual plant start up and testing. It was a successful project as Aspen Aerogels obtained their facility both on-time and on-budget.

Project Highlights

• Contract Basis – Open Book, guaranteed maximum price
• High Hazard Manufacturing Space – 23,000 SF with space designed to double this amount in the future.
• Tank Farm – Four 25,000-gallon and four 10,000-gallon tanks of hazardous materials. Also included two 100,000-lb liquefied Carbon Dioxide tanks and a 10,000-gal liquefied Nitrogen tank.
• Piping included high pressure (3000 psig) specifications designed for supercritical fluids.
• Process design via intelligent P&ID software and 3D pipe modeling program. SPEC worked with the piping subcontractor to develop isometric drawings directly from the modeling program, saving time and money during construction.
• New emissions control system consisting of a dust collector, a quench/scrubber system, and a regenerative thermal oxidizer specifically designed for use with silica based streams
• SPEC purchased the dust collector, the quench/scrubber, and the desiccant air dryer (required for compressed air needs at the TO and the dust collector).
• Client directly purchased the 25,000 cfm regenerative thermal oxidizer
• ABB DCS batch process system incorporating continuous product flow management with over 1400 points
• Process and manufacturing based performance criteria for measurement of project completion.
• Total Building Size – 150,000 SF