MACT Compliance Project, Basic Design Package

Burns & McDonnell provided a complete basic design package and project cost estimate for a new air pollutant collection system at Abbott Labs’ North Chicago campus.

• Process engineering
• Conceptual design
• Preliminary design
• Code review
• Equipment specification
• Project estimating

New pharmaceutical Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) regulations required that the North Chicago plant install a new collection and treatment system to control air emissions from its batch pharmaceutical production operations. Burns & McDonnell prepared an initial study, which surveyed, modeled and characterized the emissions streams, and provided recommendations on the most effective means of treatment. The project team selected thermal oxidation using nitrogen inerted collection headers as the control technology. Burns & McDonnell engineers prepared a preliminary design package for a plant-wide collection header, including connection of more than350 point source process vents from eight different production buildings. System design components included building internal collection headers, liquid collection/surge tanks, scrubbers, fans and main transport headers to the centralized oxidizer system. 

The engineering package included:

• Process flow diagrams
• Material balances
• Process and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) for all new piping and equipment
• Updated versions of each existing P&ID depicting vent connections to the new system
• Equipment layouts and specifications
• Preliminary piping drawings showing building collection header routing
• Vent connection piping isometrics for 14 typical categories of vent configuration
• Equipment, instrument and input/output (I/O) lists
• Project cost estimate

Burns & McDonnell also provided emission flow rate and composition information necessary to assist Abbott in specifying the oxidizer package.