KROHNE has been highlighting its process instrumentation portfolio engineered for the sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) market.
The portfolio enables producers to manage challenging feedstocks, hydrogen service and demanding process conditions ranging from pretreatment through the final downstream process.
As SAF projects move from first-of-a-kind plants toward larger-scale deployment, engineers are under pressure to upscale the process while maintaining reliable, economically viable production assets.
“The SAF industry brings together two very different worlds,” said Yannick Farine, industry manager biofuels and bioenergy at KROHNE.
“Success depends on understanding the behavior of renewable feedstocks upstream while also meeting the demands of downstream refining. Our goal is to help customers optimise processes, reduce maintenance and build SAF plants they can rely on for years to come.”
A central element of this concept is the wider use of ultrasonic flowmeters in SAF service. Unlike many traditional technologies, ultrasonic flowmeters have no internal restrictions, capillaries or moving parts and are well suited to abrasive feedstocks, hydrogen-rich streams, high-pressure steam and other critical services.
Their ability to operate at temperatures up to 600C and at high pressures for both liquids and gases makes them one of the few technologies capable of delivering accurate measurement across a broad envelope of SAF conditions.
Advanced noise-filtering in ultrasonic gas flowmeters also supports reliable hydrogen measurement, which can be challenging due to the gas’s high velocity of sound and demanding operating environment.
