Aracelys Luis Pacheco still gets excited when she remembers the days of the COVID-19 pandemic when many lives were literally saved from the gas plant of the Las Tunas Stainless-Steel Company (Acinox). Now, as then, they successfully undertake the production of medical oxygen for hospitals in several Cuban provinces.
Las Tunas, Cuba.- At present, says the main specialist of industrial plants, the situation is not as severe as it was four years ago, but once again the Ministry of Health has asked them to supply the needs of the mentioned gas for the health care institutions of the eastern region; so, once again, they got down to work.
During the pandemic, she says, they faced the challenge of adapting equipment designed to produce oxygen for industrial purposes to obtain its medical form. This meant not only complying with specific safety and security requirements but, also, above all, adapting the finished product storage gears.
In those difficult days, she recalls, “we determined at what point in the (gas separation) column we could extract this product without destabilizing the plant; and we succeeded; but not at sufficient pressure to fill each balloon,” she says. In those hours of maximum tension at Acinox, they worked against the clock; thus, a balloon with a capacity of 6.5 cubic meters of oxygen filled with only 2 cubic meters was better than nothing for the patients waiting for it in the wards at health centers.
However, she expresses with visible satisfaction, that for this “second season,” a compressor was installed that increased the filling pressure by five times so that the balloons are out at full capacity. While explaining the whole process, Aracelys looks at the noisy machine and says almost affectionately: “We are going to work on it, to stabilize it, because we don't want to force it too much."
Although he recognizes that starting up the medical oxygen line was a major technical difficulty, as it took them approximately 72 hours of continuous work, Luis Ángel Ricardo Jorge, technologist of the oxygen plant, believes that the real challenge was to gather resources and coordinate ideas for the project.
This time, Santo Ángel Laguna Rodríguez, head of the air fractionation workshop, says another important task was added: train all personnel very quickly. Especially, he says, the colleagues in the water plant who were not familiar with the risks of high-pressure oxygen. It was crucial, insists Laguna Rodríguez, that they understood the proper safety measures for handling this flammable material. At the moment, he summarizes, the operators from the Acinox plants are working in three shifts alongside their colleagues at the Industrial Gases Enterprise.
Adversity would have it that in 2021 an aspiration that the specialists of Acinox Las Tunas had designed at the time would materialize: bottling gaseous oxygen, Aracelys emphasizes. That is why, this time, they set the goal of consolidating this new production line. “We want to be able to bottle not only medical oxygen, as we are doing but also oxygen for industrial use, as well as other gases that we obtain here, such as nitrogen and argon,” she emphasizes. All of them, he stresses, are products in high demand by state and non-state companies and workshops in the province and the rest of the country.
Right now, in Acinox Las Tunas, they are performing, for the second time, with optimal efficiency, a task that they fulfill with the greatest pleasure in the world, saving many lives; and that in its version 2.0 could be definitively established for good of their economy and that of the nation.
