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Heat exchanger is made to measure for efficiency

A Spirax Sarco product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jan 23, 2007

A Spirax Sarco packaged plate heat exchange system is delivering energy savings worth GBP 150,000 a year at Corus's Llanwern strip steel processing plant near Newport, South Wales.

A Spirax Sarco packaged plate heat exchange system is delivering energy savings worth GBP 150,000 a year at Corus's Llanwern strip steel processing plant near Newport, South Wales.

The skid-mounted system was designed, supplied and commissioned by Spirax Sarco and uses waste heat from the steel works' slab furnaces to preheat boiler feed water.

The site's five reheating furnaces each take 20-tonne slabs of steel and heat them to 1250C ready for rolling into coils.

The furnaces also drive five waste heat boilers.

Three of the boilers produce high pressure steam at 12bar(g), which is distributed around the site via the steam main.

The remaining two waste heat boilers generate steam at 1.7bar(g), a pressure too low for most of the processes around the site and Corus was struggling to make full use of the steam.

Spirax Sarco Engineered System enables Corus to use this low-pressure steam to preheat the feed to the site's main boiler.

Corus decided to opt for an engineered system to keep on-site disruption to a minimum.

"We could have scheduled a conventional build but we wanted to minimise the workload on Corus", explains Process Energy Specialist Richard Charlton, Corus.

"We wanted to have a main contractor who would oversee everything, including all the pipe and electrical work".

"In fact, Spirax Sarco handled it all and there was no problem".

Charlton initially estimated that the added waste heat recovery would save around GBP130,000 per year, but he now says the system is recovering GBP 150,000 to yield a payback of less than 12 months.

The project is part of an ongoing programme of energy optimisation at Llanwern, in which Corus has generated some GBP 29 million in energy savings over five years.

"The main driver is obviously cost", says Charlton: "but we're also very conscious of the environmental benefit in terms of the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions".

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