14-04-2015

ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions contract for 2-stage slack-wax deoiling plant in Poland

Plant engineering and construction specialist ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions has been awarded a contract for the basic engineering package and license for a hard-paraffin production facility in Czechowice-Dziedzice, Poland, located about 80 km south of Katowice. The Client PolWAX S.A. is one of the largest European producers and distributers of refined and deodorized paraffin, waxes and specialty industrial paraffin compositions. The new plant with an annual capacity of 30,000 metric tons of three individual slack-wax grades will be integrated into the existing production site of PolWAX at Czechowice-Dziedzice.

The basic engineering package is scheduled to be delivered to the client within approximately seven months. Start-up of the new 2-stage deoiling-facility is planned in the middle of 2019. Upon decision has taken place to follow-up the project with the implementation phase, ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions is also supposed to deliver its proprietary equipment.

A mixture of methyl-ethyl-ketone (MEK) and toluene, which serves as a selective processing solvent for the combined crystallization-filtration mechanism of the solvent deoiling process, will be recovered from the individual hard-paraffin respectively footsoil product down to parts per million ranges and will be recycled to the filtration section. The hard-paraffin grades produced, showing oil contents from 0.5 to 1.0 wt. % are mainly used as burning-paraffin, e.g. for candle and grave-light applications, or as mouldings for casting moulds.

The production of hard-paraffin with individual specifications and properties - such as oil-content, melting-point and hardness - from different sources of oil-containing slack-waxes, requires specialist expertise and specific design features, particularly with respect to the design of the crystallization-filtration section and the solvent recovery, which are crucial for proper plant operation and requested hard-paraffin quality. Based on its own process technology for lube oils and wax production, ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions has built several solvent based dewaxing/deoiling plants, both for lube oil refineries as well as for wax producers in Germany and Eastern Europe.