New German Guideline on Reduction of Emissions and Its Impact on the Industry

Abstract

The demands on industry to reduce fugitive emissions are steadily increasing. For the European Union the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) directive determines emission levels, and this directive must be transferred into national regulations. In Germany this is done by the TA-Luft (Technical Instructions on Air Quality Control). In addition, several VDI Guidelines give details for the implementation of the TA-Luft in the industry. In the guideline VDI 2440 (“Emission Control — Mineral Oil Refineries”) there are definitions for a high-grad sealing element which must be used in bolted flange connections (BFC) in TA-Luft applications. More details are defined in the VDI guideline 2200 (“Tight Flange Connections — Selection, Calculation, Design and Assembly of Bolted Flange Connections”), the topic of which is similar to the ASME PCC-1 document. For industry the most important guideline in respect of calculation and assembly of bolted flange connections is the VDI guideline 2290 (“Reduction of Emissions — Characteristics of Tight Bolted Flange Connections”) which will be issued over the course of the year. In this guideline the tightness classes required for a particular design analysis are defined. Because of requirements on the quality management system of the operating company in respect of the assembly of the bolted flange connections, the impact of this guideline will be extensive. In the paper the most important requirements on the industry resulting of the TA-Luft and the VDI guidelines are first summarized. Then the impacts of these requirements are illustrated, and some possible implementations of these demands which are under discussion at present are shown.