So what's missing?

Now that I have learned the process, the big question is what's needed to make it all work the way it is supposed to?!

One thing I have learned so far about man power in Iran, you can not rely on them doing what they are assigned to do. Based on the experience, the more labor dependant the chemical process, the more likely to have failure in your production.

The lesson learned by my dad, when running the caustic soda flake production, was not to depend on the operator to do what is right to protect the machinery.

Most of the time, the operator is not even capable of handling more than couple tasks at a time, which makes it physically impossible to follow a sequence of actions when an event happens.

For example, if a failure happens, something like a huge leak in the feeding line to the electrolyzer cell, the final action is to shut down the production, in order to get there, multiple actions ought to happen in the right sequence. Some need to happen within few seconds of each other, 100 of meters apart! hence making it almost impossible to handle by any operator.

Automation seems to be the way to go. In fact most chemical plants, or almost any modern plant has control systems in place that handle similar situations automatically. Simply alarming the operator what is happening is the least they are entitled to do. So the goal is to put a distributed control system in place that takes control of all the key tasks that protect the plant and help running the production possible. This system is not part of the existing package, one of many reasons, no one attempted to start up the chlorine production.

A major benefit of distributed control system (DCS) is that you can centralize the control system and be able to oversee everything in one place. All the parameters and events can be logged so in case of a shut down, they could be diagnosed by analyzing the data collected.