Spraying Systems Co attends REFCOMM 2024

Join your local spray specialists Justin Burger, Chuck Munro & Dave Krueger as they discuss their experience at the REFCOMM 2024 conference for the refining industry in Galveston, Texas. 

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Justin Burger: Here we go. All right, I’m here today with Chuck Munro. Chuck, it's great to have you here at REFCOMM. Before we get started, just wanted to, you know, give a little bit, how many years have you been with the company and kind of what is the most interesting thing you've seen so far today?

Chuck Munro: I've been with Spraying Systems for just over 30 years and some of the interesting things today I think are probably about safety. You know, I think it's something that we know is important, but we don't always know the impact that our equipment has in a safe environment. And it's not necessarily our equipment per se, but it's how our equipment is used and people understanding how to use spray nozzles and the impact that the spray nozzle has on things like corrosion and such. So it's been eye opening.

Justin Burger: Well, you shared something that we were just talking about today. It was like in the 1980s, they shared something about a spray nozzle or we don't know if it was a nozzle.

Chuck Munro: Have no clue.

Justin Burger: And something blew up. I mean, can you share a little bit more about what, what you heard?         

Chuck Munro: Yeah. So there was an incident where a refinery changed their corrosion chemistry and they assumed that everything else will also be fine, but just by changing their corrosion chemistry, and it didn't atomize the way they wanted it to, it didn't volatilize the way they wanted it to do. It didn't do what they needed it to do, and it caused localized corrosion in their piping system which caused wall thinning, which then caused an explosion. And it's, it's things like that. It's because they didn't understand and they didn't take the time to go through and look at all of the other consequences of changing one thing, and you know back in the ‘80s maybe didn't have that, the level we have now of understanding and the level of analysis, but it's extremely important.

Justin Burger: Well, you bring up a good point. You know, we're at this REFCOMM conference. It's an intimate conference and a lot of people with technical prowess. But you mentioned that, you know, we don't know what we don't know. We're spraying something or maybe we're not spraying something or the customer says, “hey, I have this rheology and we're expecting it to do this”. Our customers can't see inside the pipes. So if they're not seeing inside the pipes, what are some things that they can do to help either A) with their mental models or B) transmit that knowledge to make sure that we're not at risk of blowing something up in the future, what have you seen?

Chuck Munro: Well, first of all, I don't know whose nozzle it was. I don't even know if they were using a spray nozzle. It could have been a quill. It could have been a T. I have no clue. But it's the understanding of, if I use one type of spray technology versus the other, what are the effects of that? And they may not know exactly what it means to their process, but they just know that it means something. So, for instance, you could use a quill which just drips chemistry in. Or you can use a quill with steam and that is going to have a different effect. Or you can use a spray nozzle which gives you atomization, or you can use a two-fluid nozzle which gives you a different degree of atomization. So there are different levels of what I call, different levels of spray technology or different levels of enhancing the performance of the application. And you know, inherently, intellectually, that you're going to get different outcomes by using it, and so then from there you need to start asking yourself, OK, which one's going to be better for my application.

Justin Burger: You, you bring up something, you say, “oh, it's intuitively, or I know”. You have 30 years of experience, right? And one of the things that I've learned in being able to work with you and learn from you is that what appears intuitive, I mean, a lot of times that knowledge is lost. The guys who have been in the industry 20 + 30+ years, they're not there anymore. And so how do we pick up the slack? Either it's on transmitting the knowledge, but how do we get the word out that like, hey, there's secondary primary, tertiary effects of what we do from an injection standpoint?

Chuck Munro: It's incredibly important and one of the things is, is that is that people don't always think about the spray nozzle, maybe unless something happens or whatever. But it's not foremost on their mind. And so one of the things that we do as a company is we try to educate people on things to think about, things to look for, things to — you know it's just, it's putting it a little bit closer to them so that they can start to think about it and dive deeper into the effects and things. And so one of the biggest things we do is, is these different lunch-and-learns and being able to go in [facilities] in a very technical non-sales manner and explain to people: Think about these things before you do your next spray project, and it might be important to you, and it may not, but at least you need to go through that exercise.

Justin Burger: What I like about what you said is you're creating mental models and that's what's transferable. So you create what is very dynamic, very diverse. I mean, people spend their whole careers PhD's on just the breakup of 1 droplet, right? But you're creating a mental model for these folks to carry into the plant, which then allows them in a different way, to apply what they're looking for and really understand, you know, at least the basics of what they're doing when they spray and I think that’s instrumental.

We were working with a customer or somebody just today and they were talking about, hey, we're spraying 40PSI water and what are the effects of spray angle on all these things? We were working through this process and it was one of those aspects of taking catalog data for water, but they're spraying different rheology and I mean surface tension changes, all of these aspects are completely different — viscosity. So then suddenly the published data doesn't match up. What's your suggestion for when an engineer or somebody pulls catalog data? OK water rheology is completely different. What's their next step? I mean, do they just say good enough, go for it or what should they do?

Chuck Munro: Well, I think what you were doing was perfect. You were explaining to them what the effects of the different pressures were going to have on the spray nozzle and he didn't understand that. He thought that it was going to be different, or maybe he didn't, I don't know. But you explained what the effects of the spray pressure was on the spray angle and how that then affects droplet size. And then there's a there's — it's it's, it's something that this guy's been an engineer in the in the field for many, many years, but it's not something that he thought about. There are ways that we can correlate a water droplet size to another material’s droplet size, a hydrocarbon or something that we can, we can correlate that. There are ways of using computational fluid dynamics to then take that drop size spectrum model that the spray nozzle will create with water, correlate that to the fluid that they're spraying, then take that information, put it into a CFD model of their system and of their operating parameters and then we get more realistic results of what the effects can be.

Justin Burger: And that's huge. Whenever you're you think about for a refinery it's typically what five year turnarounds? So you stick something in and you're committed for five years. To me, that's a big deal, right? So getting it right there, yeah, there could be cost to doing these discoveries, but when you're talking about razor thin margins or the health and safety of people and communities, I mean that is such a simple investment to understand what your process is doing.

Chuck Munro: Yeah. And it's, I mean that's it, but, but what you just said is probably the most important reason to at least consider doing something like CFD because you can't just test it. You can't just say let's flip a switch, turn the refinery on and go and see what happens, and then turn it off if it doesn't work right. You have to actually go in and what we're proposing is to actually make this model, and then at least you have something that you can look for down the road. There are there are different points in the process, “OK, it looks like we're having some, a lot of a lot of excess liquid here. So maybe we need to do some wall thinning measurements at this point. You know, maybe it's not corrosion, maybe it's erosion or something like that

Justin Burger: Well you mentioned corrosion. If we can pinpoint where the likelihood of where the corrosion is going to be, that's career capital. That's cost for somebody to say, “OK, I have 100 foot run of pipe”. Well, we know that it's at X amount of distance because of first principle physics so then we can just scan this portion of it and we can be more optimal with people's time and resources so that they can think of other things to help out with. That's one of those small bigs that would make a huge difference, and I think that's the value that you bring in the 30 plus years. You've seen a lot of these things. And so how do we — we got to get that knowledge out to the field out to these people, not only so they can optimize, they can help others, they can reduce the risk. But for what is a no brainer for you — That's, yeah, that's 30 years of playing with these numbers and then doing the math and making the mistakes right and so.

Chuck Munro: You know, the other thing is, is that, you know — This is the world of spray nozzles and spray technology. We love to talk about this sort of thing. We love to be able to get in touch in front of customers and talk about these things. What are the potential effects? What are the options available to you and what's important to you? What are your goals…You know that's — that's what gets us going.

Justin Burger: Well, you mentioned something. I have a — a passion of mine is understanding, you know at the molecular level what is — what are the effects? If we can get down to that — one of the things and you and I are gonna work on this — I'm confident of that. You know, watts per drop, right? How many watts does it take to generate a certain droplet size? And what's the energy input and cost for doing that? And I believe if we can get down to at least that level by the time we figure it out, somebody's going to find another unit of measure that is more detailed and more important to figure out, but I do feel if we can bound it into those simple terminologies then people will say “hey, it's not 40 lbs at 10 gallons a minute, it's X amount of watts” and then whenever we get down to that level, there's a cost and a benefit to that, you know. And to me that would be really exciting.

Chuck Munro: Yeah, that would be cool. I mean, it's just another — it's another data point, but it's an important data point because that energy cost is something that drives what they do. It takes energy to do everything that they do, and so if they can get a handle on what that is and relate it back to the spray nozzle, then…

Justin Burger: There you go. I mean, maybe there's an inflection point. We were dealing with chemical providers. They said, hey, a certain drop size gives us this amount of reaction that we're looking for. Well, maybe there's something that's good enough, right? You know, for the energy curve that it takes to get small droplets, it costs energy. Maybe there's something that's good enough and we can find that and that bandwidth.

Well, Chuck, I really appreciate, you know, taking your time to share a little bit of your knowledge and you know, we're having some fun here at REFCOMM and hopefully we'll change some minds and get some opportunities out there for people to think differently

Chuck Munro: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Very nice. Appreciate it, Justin. Thanks.

Justin Burger: All right, so I’m here with Dave Krueger. We're at the REFCOMM conference. Dave, how long have you been with spraying systems company?

Dave Krueger: It's a tough question to answer, but this May will be 26 years.

Justin Burger: Holy cow. So in your 26 years. You've needless to say, you've seen a lot. You've been in a lot of different applications. You've played in the world of sprays for a quarter of a decade, that's pretty significant.

Dave Krueger: Calling it quarter of decade makes it seem a lot longer than it really is but no.

Justin Burger: Or I’m sorry not quarter of a decade, quarter of a century. Yes. Wow. See my goodness.

Dave Krueger: No, but to be fair and honest, I think about this a lot, especially with the fact that I'm starting to realize I'm … I've been here a long time. And what does … how does one sustain their existence at a company for so long? So a couple of things, I don't want to say anything we don't already know, but it's a testament to Spraying Systems, but the fact that my role as a sales engineer I'm in the field, seeing different things every single day. And I'll never forget one of the older sales guys when I started told me you can go on a snow hill with a snow jet nozzle in the morning and be at a refinery in the afternoon. Yeah. You know, so I feel like my role is truly a Jack of all trades.

Justin Burger: Well, and you know, speaking of a Jack of all trades, you're here today in Galveston, TX at the REFCOMM conference for the refining industry, you know you've sat in on a few things trying to see this. I mean, you've been at it for several years. What are one of the key takeaways that you've seen at this conference that maybe you know, folks in the service might not realize, you know, what have you noticed?

Dave Krueger: Look, a couple things, one being I I've been with this company 25/26 years. Do I know everything? Not even close. I know enough to be dangerous, but here's an application, a market that we're trying to penetrate in the Midwest, so. A bit intimidating here for one, in that a lot of the lingo, the technology, the products and applications are a bit over my head, but that's fine. I embrace that challenge. So I'm here to learn a little bit and what I found fascinating about this is while it is very niche industrial oriented, I could see where our nozzles can fit in the application. Hopefully that answers your question. I kind of went off on a little tangent, but…

Justin Burger: Absolutely. Well, what I love that you said about you know, finding where the spray is and you've seen this so much from being in bakeries, being in manufacturing, in all of these aspects and here you are at REFCOMM and you don't have to go very far to see where a nozzle fits in, right. And what commonalities do you see from your knowledgebase 26 years of… maybe the terminology is a little bit different, but what are the fundamentals that are very similar to what you see across the the whole landscape and the refining industry?

Dave Krueger: Commonalities amongst other applications?

Justin Burger: Yeah, other applications or fundamentals that you just...

Dave Krueger: And it's to be honest, it's something that I learned later on in my career at Spray is and it's the engineering principle: Keep it simple. I think about this and I've talked with a lot of newer guys. Our expertise is in atomization. It's in droplets. What is a nozzle? I mean we can define it in a in a bunch of ways, but every one of those definitions kind of comes back to the fact that a nozzle produces droplets. And if you think about just droplets, what are we trying to do? Are we coating something? Are we cooling something? And here at the REFCOMM show these applications and I'm learning so bear with me, it's, you know water wash, chemical injection, gas cooling. We're trying to increase the surface area of whatever that chemistry is to make a more efficient process. You know, I've done a lot of gas cooling and that's the perfect example. The finer the droplets, the easier it is for them to evaporate, which brings more heat out of the process, makes it more efficient.

Justin Burger: Well, and that's so important for our customers, you know and the paradigm shift as spray technology evolves and as processes evolve, you know, one of the things I love what you said is we don't even know what we don't. Yeah. You know, we live every day in spray and spray technology and every single day I've learned something so new and so novel and get to apply to so many different things. And I think that's what's exciting having you here is having a different perspective and being able to hear our customers. And you can say, well, you know what you and I were talking about bakeries, right? We're talking about the stalagtites and stalagmites of the oil that was sitting there, well that visual is really powerful because a lot of these guys can't see inside their pipes. Imagine if we say, oh, by the way, we have some stuff in a bakery. This is what happened. We're spraying oil, right? Yeah, and you get these occlusions and you can see it in a safe way. It's like, well, perhaps that's what's happening inside of some of these pipes and perhaps there's a better way to do it. right? Get a better atomization or be more fruitful with the energy that we're utilizing. And that's just the beauty of this. So what's the one take away today that you've had? You know, we've been here for one day so far. You've got to see some customer interaction. What's the one thing that you say, hey, this really stood out to me over other industries that you've been in?

Dave Krueger: Just, you know, mingling as best I can with the audience here, the level of intelligence in the sense of these folks here at this specific conference know their industry like the back of their hand. The longevity of being in the industry. They're truly experts so I, you know, I have to rely on folks like you and Chuck to, you know, help me identify what the nozzle solution is to any given problem. That's really stood out to me. Just kind of standing back and absorbing the conversations being had and the interaction amongst the people.

Justin Burger: Yeah. No, I think you you bring up a good point of you know, the technical nature of these folks in Texas is different. It's very familial. Yeah, these are probably multi generation oil and gas guys. So they're dad’s-dad’s-dad, was probably was working in the refinery field or the oil field in some way shape or form. I think what you're witnessing is, yeah, there's some technical piece, but it's tribal knowledge. Yeah, that's very localized, but very specific. And what's great about that is spray is diverse enough to be able to have that expertise within that domain. And then it's transferable. That's the coolest part is you’re forced with oil and gas, you're down to the economics of a molecule and what that molecule does. If you can do that in the petrochemical world, imagine the fruits that bakeries can get from that or manufacturing can get from that, and the reciprocal. And that's kind of the beauty of the diversity of our business model.

Dave Krueger: Yeah, you made me also think listening and hearing and speaking to these folks, they care about the nozzles because it's part of their process, so they're process oriented people. Yeah, to begin with, not to say anything less about other industries, but I work in a variety of industries. Food, chemical, general manufacturing, and a lot of our customers just don't care about the nozzle. They just want you to fix their problem.

Justin Burger: Yeah.

Dave Krueger: And that's fine. And we can do that, but as a sales guy, I feel like we need to get them engaged in the process. To open their eyes a little bit and open up and let's understand the process like we've talked about, like what's happening upstream and downstream, so that we can not only fix what you have, but possibly make it better. Because I think that's where we have a leg to stand on compared to our competitors. We can — It's the good, better, best analogy. You know, we could replace like-for-like and that could be good enough. But we want to get to the best, you know, because it's where we all want to be in terms of a solution and be able to help you long term.

Justin Burger: I really like what you said, you know. So what's your one key advice? We're hiring on a whole slew of new sales guys, right? The institutional knowledge, tribal knowledge that we have as a company, I mean, there's like 16-17, I forget what the number is, of guys who are 20 or 30 year employees and it's going — it's leaving. I've been here for only eight years and Christie Hofer was very... she was nice… “Justin you're gonna only be dangerous after seven years”. So I'm just now getting dangerous enough, you know, to play but what's your one piece of advice for the guys who are starting to, you know, in in this new era, right, we live in a world steeped with digitization, technology, but also a need for knowledge and transfer. I mean, what's your… What's your advice to these guys?

Dave Krueger: Well, a couple of things. I'd say No Fear. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to talk to others. Don't be afraid to reach out and network internally. I've challenged some of the new people I've met at sales meetings or within my own domain to speak up, speak out. I'll help you as much as I can. If I can't, it's... you have a library of resources, digital resources in our organization. But there's no better asset than reaching out to your fellow salespeople because that's where the knowledge is — actual application knowledge, that's one. Don't be afraid to make a mistake. We learn from our mistakes. Reach, once again, seek out the MDT's, the industrial experts to help. Then get in the field, get in the field and learn the application like we talked about a little earlier. Like I'm here to, if not for anything, it might sound silly, to pick up the lingo. Just the language these folks speak with.

Justin Burger: Yeah.

Dave Krueger: When you're in the chemical industry or the steel industry, if you can talk the talk, it helps you walk the walk a little bit. You know you start to sound a little bit more of an expert and then you build that trust and that's sales one-on-one is relationships and trust.

Justin Burger: Yeah, I love what you said about building that trust and how important that is on the front end with our customers. And two, you mentioned about making mistakes. I mean, that's to me is the greatest teacher of all. If we're successful in everything that we do, we'll perhaps we're not pushing the envelope enough to make those mistakes, to get to those leaps.

Dave Krueger: Yeah, yeah.

Justin Burger: I'll never forget. I was just starting out my career at Spray and I was dealing with the process. I knew nothing about process industry. I was like, what am I doing? I was trying to figure out all these fundamental formulas. Vernon goes, I was sitting there for probably 4 hours. I got a data sheet and all these things — chemical formulas. He says to me “Justin what are you doing?” I was like, I'm trying to figure out what nozzle to select based off the chemistry. He goes, “Justin, you have a lab. Go get a nozzle and hook it up and spray it and see what you see”, you know. Right? Well, geez, you know, that's for him, I think it was 20 or 30 years at the time of knowledge and wisdom that he gave to me. Go spray it and see what happens.

Dave Krueger: That's a that's a good one. When in doubt, spray it.

Justin Burger: Yeah.

Dave Krueger: We fall into the trap of living our life out of a catalog, and if you follow the catalog, everything's gonna spray great. Yeah. The catalog is based on water. If everybody was spraying water, that would be great, but we wouldn't be here.

Justin Burger: That's right. They wouldn't need us.

Dave Krueger: Yeah. So there's a reason we're here. It’s because we're challenged to do the 95% of the applications where we're not spraying water. And like I tell a lot of my customers like: What is the viscosity? What is the rheology of the fluid you're spraying? Cause viscosity is the number one component that's gonna affect the quote un-quote “sprayability”.

Justin Burger: Yeah, can you move the liquid?

Dave Krueger: Hey, can you move it? I've run into application work. Can you spray this stuff? And it's semi-solid. it's as thick as honey. I said I could probably spray it, but you need to get it to me first. How are you going to get it to me? and that was that was the challenge.

Justin Burger: We can spray anything with enough energy. Get enough pressure behind it and it'll move.

Dave Krueger: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Justin Burger: You know, that's a good point. Is really, yeah. Parameterizing and having those heuristics. What you just mentioned is people relate to honey. Yeah. They relate to peanut butter. They relate to soapy water and those things and…

Dave Krueger: I use a lot of food applications as an analogy. When I'm talking to chemical and process customers cause…

Justin Burger: Everybody likes food.

Dave Krueger: Because everybody knows what food is, they know. They know what chocolate is, and chocolate is the benchmark of 25,000 centipoise.

Justin Burger: See and that's huge because you were just showing me some videos today. You’re spraying chocolate, you're like, “Hey, this is optically…”, you said this is a good spray. Yeah, this is a good spray for chocolate. And to the untrained eye we would have no idea and that's you know, having 20 something years of experience and being able to say, hey, how do we pass that down right to not only to internally but to our customers of you know what and also were you using, how did you get to that solution to say that you know you know the mindset behind it, there's a lot that goes down to how many SKUs it's like one-hundred-and-something-thousand.

Dave Krueger: Every year, it seems like it grows.

Justin Burger: Yeah, you know, and it's, it's funny. The chemical guys, I'll always ask them this because I'm curious how many SKUs do they think we have? You know the chemical guys. "Oh you know we sell 20 unique products. Yeah, maybe a max is 200 products". Yeah. Could you imagine if we only had 200 nozzles? Yes. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's it's a different world that we live in and. Yeah, that's exciting. Well, Dave, I really appreciate your time and sharing your knowledge with us and. Hopefully REFCOMM will be a fun, fun experience and get you coming back next year for us.

Dave Krueger: Oh, it's been all my pleasure, and I'm grateful that you guys invited me down here and opened up your your arms to bring me in here and teach me the ropes. Here we all learn from each other. And that's how we we all get better.

Justin Burger: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it and talk to you soon.