Chemical Industry

This paper provides a brief description and overview of the implementation of a replacement process cooling water system (PCW) at a Large Multi National Semiconductor Manufacturer in Scotland.

Background

The Semiconductor Manufacture is a producer of microelectronic chips used throughout the world in personal computers and Ipods. The processes involved are the use of a number of ultra pure chemicals and gases.

The PCW system was used to cool over 200 process tools with a value in excess of £200 million.

The existing system was over 20 yrs old and due to production expansion the system was running at full capacity. A number of failures on the plant have cost in excess of £0.5 million in lost production and damaged product.

Implementation

The driving force for the implementation of the PCW system was an need to expand capacity, increasing operational performance and improving energy efficiency across the whole system.

The design undertaken incorporated a number of energy and performance related initiatives including:

• Efficient duty point of pump selection
• High efficiency motors
• Variable speed drive
• Close operational control
• Full plant operation upon control failure, without system issues
• 100% fully redundant system design.

The Results

The results of the project were extremely positive and can be summarised as follows:

• 100% uptime of the system
• Energy consumption was reduced by 5% amounting to 250,000 kWh/yr of electricity
• Maintenance costs were reduced on this area of the plant.
• Labour efficiency was increased by reducing the menial task of meter reading collection

Category: Case Studies