Join Matt Dixon, Application Commercialisation Manager at Swagelok, as he explains what you need to know to make ammonia sampling as safe and efficient as possible.
Ammonia is commonly used by chemical plants and refineries in the production of fertilizers, plastics, textiles, petroleum, and more. To avoid severe stress corrosion cracking in storage tanks and product quality concerns, anhydrous ammonia is sampled to verify a water content of 0.2% to 0.5%. There are many challenges with manual ammonia sampling methods, however:
- Operators must wear full PPE to avoid being potentially exposed to dangerous ammonia liquid/vapours.
- Sampling results depend on the skills and judgement of the operator, and variances in the rate of evaporation can also cause inaccuracies.
- Evaporation also takes a significant amount of time – it can take eight or more hours before samples can be measured.
