Categoría: Power and Energy

Cost of Ownership

In today’s melt shops, cost of ownership is tracked more than ever. Tracking these costs and knowing how a piece of equipment is affecting the bottom line is important. There are several items to consider when purchasing replacement equipment and capital upgrades: Knowing the equipment manufacture as well as their suppliers. Cost of installing the equipment. The value of improvements to the equipment for longer equipment life. When choosing an equipment supplier knowing the equipment suppliers suppliers is important. Most…

10 Recommendations for Air-Cooled Heat Exchangers (ACHE) Installation.

For proper installation of air-coolers, it is necessary to take as a guide the installation, start-up, operation and maintenance manuals supplied by the equipment manufacturer and to read the instructions in detail before performing any maneuvers on the equipment, it is important to read the procedures, safety and warning instructions, which allow the safe and continuous use of the air – coolers. The following  are the 10 recommendations  for  the  installation  of  an  Air – Cooler: 1.- The equipment should be leveled on the anchor bolts,…

What is Lean Manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing is a philosophy/management system on how to operate a people-based business, which defines how to improve and optimize a production system to focus on identifying and eliminating all kinds of “waste”, Defined as those processes or activities that use more resources than necessary. Identify some types of “waste” observed in production: overproduction, waiting time, transportation, overprocessing, inventory, movements and defects. Lean focuses on what should not be done as it does not add customer value and tends to…

Nanotechnology Innovation

A well-known fact about the operation of the electric arc furnace is that the water-cooled panels take away a considerable amount of the heat produced during melting cycle resulting in a reduced efficiency. Currently it is known that having a good slag cover will help reduce energy loss, damage to the pipes on the panels and increase life to a certain extent. However, the slag is not enough to keep the heat inside the furnace and so water continues to…

PNEUMATIC TEST

What is it? It is an alternative procedure that replaces the hydrostatic test, using pressurized inert gas in the water cooled components with an ultrasound leak detection equipment. Objective: Replace the hydrostatic test by a pneumatic pressure test in order to avoid remnants of fluids (water or antifreeze) inside the water-cooled circuits and detect even the smallest leaking spots before shipping the fabricated items to our customers. Remnants of liquids from hydrostatic test will freeze when exposed at low temperatures…

MAKING A DECISION ABOUT THE USE OF SLAG RETAINERS IN THE ROOF & SHELL PANELS

During the years, there have been opposite opinions about the use of slag retainers in the Roof & Shell panels. Even though the retainers help to retain the slag, when you weld them to the pipe there is a grain growth in the steel microstructure that weakens the pipe’s strength in the weld heat affected area; normally the thermal fatigue stress cracks start appearing in the neighborhood of these seam welds on the pipes exposed to temperature. So, adding slag…