In air pollution control engineering, experience is not defined only by successful projects, but by the lessons learned when systems behave differently in real operating conditions than they do on paper. At Apzem, we believe that acknowledging and learning from such outcomes is essential to delivering reliable, safe, and long-lasting emission control solutions. These learnings have shaped our engineering approach, so our clients do not have to face the same challenges. Over more than 15 years of hands-on experience in air pollution control, Apzem has designed and evaluated scrubber systems across a wide range of industries, gas chemistries, and operating environments. This long-term exposure has given us insight into how systems perform not just at commissioning, but months and years into operation. Many of our strongest design principles today come directly from observing where real-world conditions stress theoretical assumptions. One of the earliest lessons we learned was that meeting a calculated removal efficiency does not guarantee stable site performance. Several early systems achieved target efficiencies under steady-state assumptions but struggled during fluctuating loads, batch operations, or transient emissions. This reinforced the need to design for peak conditions, upset scenarios, and process variability rather than average values alone. Another critical learning involved scrubbing chemistry selection. Early reliance on commonly accepted reagents or “standard” media revealed limitations when side reactions, humidity effects, or competing contaminants were present. Even chemically sound solutions can underperform if reaction kinetics, saturation behavior, or by-product formation are overlooked. As a result, we now treat every scrubber, wet or dry as a chemical system first, and a mechanical system second. We also learned that maintenance reality often differs from design intent. Compact or highly optimized layouts sometimes proved difficult to operate or maintain in practice. Limited access to packing, complex piping arrangements, or assumptions about operator intervention led to avoidable downtime. This experience established a core principle in our designs: if a system cannot be easily understood, accessed, and maintained by site teams, its long-term performance will suffer regardless of design quality. Another important lesson came from over-reliance on vendor data and catalog values. Mass transfer coefficients, media life estimates, and pressure drop values often reflect ideal conditions that rarely exist in operating plants. Dust loading, water quality, ambient temperature, and process variability significantly affect performance. Today, Apzem designs incorporate conservative, experience-backed margins validated against site-specific realities rather than theoretical limits. Perhaps the most defining lesson has been learning when to challenge specifications or say no. In some cases, client-provided data or tender requirements were incomplete or technically inconsistent. Executing such designs without clarification may have been easier in the short term, but riskier in the long run. Our experience has shown that responsible engineering sometimes means questioning inputs and proposing alternatives, even when it complicates early discussions. These lessons, accumulated over 15+ years of field-driven engineering, form the foundation of how Apzem approaches every project today. We design with fewer assumptions, greater respect for chemistry and operations, and a strong focus on real-world behavior rather than ideal conditions. Mistakes, when properly analyzed, become engineering intelligence and our responsibility is to ensure that intelligence directly benefits our clients through systems that perform reliably throughout their operational life
