HOW FAST DO PIGS TRAVEL?

If you’ve ever seen a live demo of an HPS - Product Recovery Solutions pigging system, you’ll know that pigs travel pretty quickly.

I’m not talking about the animal, obviously.

In this context, a ‘pig’ is the name given to a specialist projectile that saves companies that manufacture or process liquids tens, often hundreds of thousands of $s/£s/€s every year while at the same time improving their environmental sustainability and reducing carbon footprint.

Many people are surprised by the speed at which pigs travel through pipelines.

Generally, in pigging systems provided by HPS, the pigs travel at an extremely fast speed. This is great for efficiency and productivity.

Which means, if you work for a company that processes liquids and choose to use pigging technology, your product changeovers will be much faster, saving time, increasing capacity, using less energy and freeing up your resources.  

And in the current economic climate, that’s a pretty good outcome.

Broadly speaking, the speed at which pigs travel through the length of the pipeline is dependent on a number of factors.

For instance, pigs will typically slow down around 1.5 D – 90° bends. They also tend to speed up towards the end of the travel because there is less product to push through the pipelines.

Similarly, pigging systems that use gas rather than liquids to propel the pig tend to be less smooth because of the gas compressibility.

In our testing facility, the HPS research team has measured the average speed of an HPS pig at 40.56 mph, or 18.14 m/s.

In practice, it’s not uncommon to see a pipeline pigs' running velocity reach 10 metres per second. It’s actually rare though that our engineers will set them to travel at maximum speed. They will usually slow the pigs down to a speed that’s safe and manageable.  

Either way, it means most pigging operations last just a few seconds, sometimes even fractions of a second.

This makes the whole pigging process extremely quick, and efficient, while minimising interruption to operations.

If you work for a company that processes liquids and you’re looking to increase yields and capacity, cut waste, save water, speed up changeovers, reduce effluent all while improving your environmental sustainability, send me a message or leave a comment and I’ll send you a free whitepaper, relevant to your industry, which will tell you all about HPS liquid product recovery (pigging) technology – what it is, what it does, how it works, the benefits and more.

#pigging #liquid #manufacturing #sustainability #processengineering