Historical peak
In August Metafrax Chemicals company produced 1438 tons of sodium formate. This is the record product output in the entire history of the enterprise. The result obtained exceeds the average output value in the first half of the year by more than a third.
Metafrax produces sodium formate since 1997. This is a by-product of the pentaerythritol production, which Gubakha chemists learned to extract from the production wastes, purify and send to the consumers.
Today the large-scale modernization program is ongoing at the pentaerythritol production, under which a secondary mother liquor purification unit was put into operation at the end of last year.
- We began to clean those mother liquors that contain pentaerythritol, sodium formate and dipentaerythritol from by-products and return them to the cycle for recovery. What we couldn’t recover before, we now recover. We needed several months from the moment of the plant start-up to refine and debug the processes, and today we are already seeing the result - 1,438 tons of sodium formate per month,” said Dmitry Budin, head of the technological bureau of the Production and Technical Department of Metafrax Chemicals.
And this are not the final values, department specialists are sure. In October, as part of the shutdown maintenance of the sodium formate recovery unit, it is planned to perform works on technical revamping of vacuum-crystallization plants, these works will contribute to further increase of the product output.
As a whole, modernization program will allow to increase capacities of pentaerythritol production up to 27 thousand tons per year, to increase the volumes of the sodium formate and dipentaerythritol recovered, to improve the technical-economic indicators and the environmental component.
Sodium formate is the product, which is in demand on the market. It is used in many fields, such as construction, chemical industry. Sodium formate is actively used in the process of deicing agents’ production. It is used as an antifreeze additive in production of various building structures. Also, it is used in the leather industry, in various pre-tanning operations.