Evaluation and improvement of a relative volume-measuring instrument

The value of the relative volume (RV) is a parameter applied by producers of adsorbent materials to determine the quality of the adsorption performance of manufactured products. This is an ideal method for an easily accessible, quick, and simple quality check. Nowadays, there are several procedures for determining the RV-value, but none of them represent a standard. In the perspective of the Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, a carbon molecular sieves (CMS) supplier company expects the automation of its own internal manual method to calculate the RV-value. An automated method based on a different procedure already exists, although it does not reflect the internal company standard and it does not provide representable results. However, this system also allows the measurement of the maximum and average concentration of adsorbed oxygen for each measurement cycle, other quality parameters of CMS. Therefore, the purpose of this scientific work is the modification of a pre-existing automated procedure for the determination of the RV-value, conforming it to the internal standard of a chemical company and identifying errors/flaws, to make it reproducible for the analysis of different types of adsorbents. Chapter 1 is introductory, while Chapter 2 reports some theoretical notions about adsorption. Chapter 3 presents the equipment of the RV-test plant and the Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) Portal software employed for the automation and control of the Siemens S7-1200 Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), as well as the principles of the automated procedure, adapted to the internal company standard. In Chapter 4 the issues of the RV-apparatus, identified with a Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and their resolution are described. Chapter 5 shows the data collected during the measurements, the verification of the accuracy according to the Gauss method and a discussion of the results. In conclusion, Chapter 6 contains overall considerations and future perspectives.