Optimising gas cylinder drying
I often see a solution at gas plants and gas cylinder maintenance facilities, where 80-120 gas cylinders are dried simultaneously after hydrostatic testing. This all happens at a relatively low temperature of 30-50 degrees Celsius.
I have always protested against this. Why?
- 80-120 bottles won't fit in a small space. 80-120 bottles require approximately 20-30 m², and that doesn't even include the pathways.
- Placing the bottles next to each other and then taking them out is the same as unnecessarily moving the bottles to a larger drying area. I'm walking around the bottles placed tightly next to each other: A lot of time = a lot of human work.
Store the gas cylinders for 6-8 hours?
- The bottles are stopped in the maintenance process
- The customer will get their bottles back 6-8 hours later
- My production process will have 80-120 more bottles. This is a semi-finished product that the customer will not pay for, and I can't even fill it if it's my own.
What do I consider a good solution?
- Let's produce at the pace that is required. What should I do if I need to service 150 bottles per day, and I have 480 minutes for this? I have a test rig that is suitable for testing 6 gas cylinders at once? Then I should finish a 6-cylinder test cycle approximately every 20 minutes. I need a drying unit that will be able to dry 6 gas cylinders in 20 minutes. There will only be 12 bottles in production. They can be immediately passed on to the next operations.
- Install the dryer as close as possible to the printing press without obstructing the movement of gas cylinders, or the loading and unloading of the machine. With a 20-minute cycle time, one person can operate the dryer and the test printing machine on a semi-automatic machine.
- Here, I will describe the good use of old press tables. There are already press tables that carry out the filling, pressure testing, emptying and drying of gas cylinders with water in a fully automated manner. Here there are only 6 cylinders in production, with all the advantages of this.
Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions. We are happy to assist you with the optimisation of production processes, problem-solving and lean support, along with our colleagues from the Lean Enterprise Institute Hungary.
