The industrial world is hardly working with the pace of a Silicon Valley startup. In heavy manufacturing, where heat, pressure and chemical reactions rule the rate of progress, innovation is typically gauged in decades. However, this week, an international industry giant, Lubrizol, successfully shredded the old playbook.
Lubrizol is not merely re-inventing a production process with the introduction of its game-changing LED-based curing technology of Chlorinated Polyvinyl Chloride (CPVC): it is redefining the process through which the most vital piping and fire protection materials in the world are created. It is the shift of the brute force of the conventional chemical processing to the light surgical precision.
The Invisible Revolution: Heat to Light
In order to find out how this is important, it is necessary to consider the conventional production of CPVC. The process has been based on high-energy ultraviolet (UV) lamps or thermal heating to induce the chlorination of PVC over the past sixty years. These are the gas guzzlers of the industrial world, big, very hot, and likely to keep on failing.
The new LED technology by Lubrizol substitutes these outdated mercury-vapor lamps with high intensity narrow spectrum LED arrays. This is a laser, but in case traditional manufacturing was a floodlight.
It is not a simple upgrade; at least that is what a senior engineer working on the pilot phase says. It is the transition of a wood-fired stove to an induction cooktop. You have a better control, less waste, and a much safer environment of the people at the factory floor.
The reason the Shift is Breakthrough
The technical benefits of LED versus the conventional UV lamps are mind-blowing:
- Energy Saving: LEDs will use a maximum of 75% less power than the conventional mercury lamps.
- Heat Management: Conventional lamps produce a lot of infrared heat and thus they need heat cooling systems. The LEDs operate at low temperatures making the whole reactor design easier.
- Time: A mercury lamp may have a life of 1,000 hours; an LED array could have a life of 50,000.
- Instantly on: LEDs come on instantly; unlike the UV lamps, which need a warm-up to turn on, LEDs turn on immediately when the power is turned on again.
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Safety and Sustainability on the Factory Floor: Humanizing It
We have a profoundly human story behind the balance sheets and the chemistry sets. Still, the employees of chemical plants had to cope with the dangers of mercury-vapor lamps not only with the amount of heat that these lamps produce, but also with the toxic content of mercury.
The replacement of LED with LED is eliminating a major environmental and occupational risk to Lubrizol. Once a mercury lamp explodes, it is a hazmat. When the LED fails it is merely a maintenance procedure.
Also, the LED reaction is cooler in nature, which permits more uniform product. Consistency in plumbing and fire sprinklers is equated to safety. The pipe made with the uniform chlorination is less prone to cracking under pressure or deterioration with time in residential high-rise.
A sustainability executive at the Ohio headquarters of Lubrizol says that when we discuss sustainability, we are referring to carbon footprints. However, sustainability is also concerned with how long the infrastructure we construct can last. By being able to produce a harder, more dependable CPVC by consuming only 40 percent of the energy we would be saving the world and also the individuals who occupy the buildings we plumb.
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