Aggreko’s cooling towers rescue steel manufacturer
Aggreko, the world leader in the supply of
temporary power and temperature control solutions, has helped a
leading steel manufacturer keep its cool following a serious fire
at the company’s plant in South Wales.
A 33MW cooling tower at Celsa Manufacturing in
Cardiff was destroyed by the fire, which was accidentally started
during routine maintenance. Faced with an immediate loss of
production, John Parsons, engineering manager at the Celsa UK melt
shop, contacted Aggreko’s National Rental Centre.
Aggreko sales engineer Steve Paskell and
service engineer Andrew Jones quickly made an in-depth assessment
of the site and with the help of Jan van der Waal, senior process
design engineer from Aggreko Process Services (APS), specified the
temporary cooling solution for the customer.
By noon the following day, a total of 12
temporary cooling tower modules and ancillary equipment had arrived
in Cardiff and the Aggreko team set about ensuring an effective
cooling water feed for the plant. Jan van der Waal and
the Aggreko team met up with Celsa’s engineers on site to plan and
fine tune the operation.
A major technical and logistical bottleneck of
supplying and returning the cooling water from the remaining water
pumping system to the Aggreko temporary cooling tower modules was
overcome by raising the modules to provide enough height to gravity
return the cooling water back into Celsa’s 4.5m high sump. To
achieve this, 36 empty shipping containers were sourced from a
local company and the Aggreko temporary cooling tower modules were
then assembled on top. This eliminated the need to manufacture
large 20ft return pipe runs and shorten the feed to the temporary
system, which would have resulted in additional expenditure and
even more costly delay for the customer to resume production.
Zaw Hein, Aggreko Process Services
explains: “This was a particularly tricky and technical
project where a temporary cooling towers solution was the best
option to keep production downtime to a minimum and to get the
customer back on line as quickly as possible.
The innovative temporary arrangement Aggreko
provided for Celsa demonstrates our technical ability and sheer
resourcefulness in finding a solution to the customer’s problem.
Our engineers worked through the night to get equipment and factory
up and running by 2.00am on Monday”
John Parsons, engineering manager at Celsa
Manufacturing, said: “We have to admit that we thought an
effective, temporary cooling tower scenario would be very difficult
to achieve at our facility and we were delighted with the speed of
response, logistical planning and coordination support received
from Aggreko. We were very impressed not only with the speed
of their service, but their technical expertise and inventive
approach to solve a very difficult problem.”