Cleveland Steel, Chemical, and Power Operations Rely on Lime for Flue Gas Desulfurization, Softening, and pH Adjustment
Weight based preparation and precision feed equipment for Northeast Ohio mills, polymer plants, and generating stations, designed and built by RDP Technologies.
Discuss a Project See Documented InstallationsLime Demand in the Cuyahoga Valley and Beyond
Northeast Ohio kept its heavy industry when a lot of the Rust Belt did not. Integrated steelmaking still runs in the valley below downtown, the specialty chemical and polymer cluster stretching east through Lake County is among the largest in the country, and the generating fleet along the Ohio River sits inside a comfortable service radius. Each one buys lime for a different reason and every one of them needs it delivered at a concentration that does not move. Municipal facilities in the region are covered on our Cleveland water and wastewater treatment equipment page.
Sulfur Capture and Flue Gas Desulfurization Reagent Feed for Ohio Mills and Generating Stations
Integrated steelmaking is a sulfur intensive business from end to end. Coke ovens, sinter plants, and blast furnaces each present their own gas cleaning problem, and the mill operating in the Cuyahoga flats carries those obligations alongside the rest of the Ohio and Indiana steel belt. Farther south, the generating stations along the Ohio River installed substantial wet scrubbing capacity and continue to run it. Ohio EPA writes the air permits, EPA Region 5 sits above the program, and the lime kilns and cement operations spread across the state's carbonate belt fall under the same framework.
Two design families cover nearly all of it. A wet absorber circulates lime or limestone suspension against the gas and fixes the sulfur as a calcium compound leaving with the blowdown. Dry injection and semi dry towers skip the recirculating loop and meter powdered reagent into the gas path ahead of the collector. Both punish inconsistent reagent in exactly the same way, through removal figures that drift on the monitor and a sorbent bill nobody can tie back to tons of sulfur captured.
Preparing reagent to a repeatable concentration is what RDP supplies. Batching against measured weight rather than volume pins the strength to the design value, and one unit will take either quicklime or hydrated lime without a mechanical conversion, so a plant is free to follow reagent pricing without rebuilding anything.
Precision Hydrated Lime
Lime Softening Ahead of High Pressure Steam and Process Water in Northeast Ohio Plants
A mill and a polymer plant both live or die on steam, and the boilers producing it are unforgiving about what arrives in the feedwater. Hardness lays down scale on tube surfaces, silica carries over into the turbine, and neither problem announces itself until efficiency has already been lost. Plants pulling from Lake Erie deal with a moderate mineral load at very high volume, while operations further inland across Summit, Portage, and Medina counties draw from carbonate aquifers that deliver genuinely hard water before any treatment at all.
Lime softening remains the practical answer at industrial throughput. The addition drives pH up until calcium leaves as a carbonate and magnesium separates as its hydroxide, and soda ash joins the reaction where hardness outside the carbonate fraction has to come down too. Taken to temperature, the reaction captures silica as well, which is the whole reason hot process equipment still stands ahead of high pressure generation rather than being replaced by something newer.
None of that settles predictably if the reagent itself is inconsistent. On a Tekkem slaker the lime and the water are each weighed out before the reaction starts, the batch is held in the temperature band slaking genuinely needs, and dilution to the working concentration happens afterward. Steady feed gives a basin that behaves the same way on every shift.
How the Slaker Works
pH Adjustment for Chemical and Polymer Manufacturers Discharging to the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie
The specialty chemical corridor running east from Cleveland through Lake County produces some of the most varied process wastewater in the Midwest, and additives, coatings, and polymer intermediates rarely leave a reactor at a pH anyone would accept. Nothing about the receiving waters here is casually regulated. The Cuyahoga carries a history that most of the country still remembers, it remains a designated Area of Concern under the Great Lakes agreement with an active restoration program, and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District has spent years and considerable money on what enters its system and what reaches the lake.
Lime earns its place because a single addition satisfies two separate requirements. Bringing pH up puts the discharge inside its authorized band, and the same movement converts dissolved metals into hydroxides that drop out for removal rather than passing through. The operational problem is not the reaction but the schedule, because batch chemical production sends loading in waves and equipment calibrated on an average simply cannot follow it.
Control is what resolves that. Tekkem dosing responds to measured flow or a concentration target the plant defines, so effluent stays inside its limits without an operator watching a meter. Multiple treatment points draw from one circulating loop through pinch valve and flow meter taps, and lines stay open rather than closing down with deposit over a season.
Our Lime Feed Line
Grit, Scale, and What Variable Lime Quality Does to a Feed System
Quicklime is a mined and burned product, not a manufactured chemical, and it arrives carrying inert grit along with the reactive calcium oxide. That grit does not dissolve. It settles into tanks, abrades pumps, accumulates in lines, and over enough time it becomes the reason a system that once worked now needs attention every week. Change suppliers on price and the grit content can change with it, which is why a feed system that ran cleanly for years occasionally starts misbehaving for no reason anyone can trace.
Scale is the second half of the problem. Lime slurry deposits calcium carbonate wherever flow stalls or the chemistry shifts, and a delivery line narrowing gradually gives no warning until dosing falls short. Dead legs, intermittent branches, and idle taps are where it starts.
RDP designs around both rather than treating them as somebody else's maintenance burden. Grit separation is part of the process train, the continuous circulating loop keeps slurry moving instead of sitting, and automated acid wash provisions exist to clear deposit from the mixing vessel, the holding tank, and the delivery system without dismantling anything. The company holds multiple patents covering this equipment, and scale handling is a substantial part of what they describe.
Papers and Technical Notes
Replacing an Aging Slaker Without Rebuilding the Whole Feed House
Most lime systems in this region are not new, and the ones causing trouble are usually paste or detention slakers installed decades ago that have reached the end of a long life. The instinct is to assume replacement means demolishing the feed house, but that is rarely what the project actually requires. Silos, conveyors, structural support, and much of the existing piping frequently stay exactly where they are.
What changes is the reaction and control end. A weight based unit slots into the footprint an older slaker occupied, ties into existing lime delivery above it and existing dosing points below it, and brings modern control with it. The conversion argument rests on a documented record rather than a claim, with some 65 plants citing lower maintenance labor and spend once the changeover was complete.
The practical question on any retrofit is how much of the plant has to stand still while it happens. That gets answered by looking at the actual site rather than by guessing from a catalog. We design, fabricate, and program controls in house, which means the sequencing discussed during scoping is a commitment we can hold rather than a hope about what a subcontractor might manage.
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