TPi May 2014

business & market news

Three miles of pipe for blast furnace cooling

with two pump houses, each with operational and standby pumps. Major sections of the pipework, including heat exchangers and valves, were prefabricated offsite at Fairwood Fabrications’ facility at Port Talbot.

A new blast furnace at Tata Steel’s Port Talbot steelworks has been equipped with three miles of cooling pipework, installed by Fairwood Fabrications and supplied by Pipe Center. The £9mn installation was part of a complete rebuild of No 4 Blast Furnace at the plant in South Wales, UK, which has created one of the most modern iron making facilities in the world. The pipework forms an essential part of the furnace’s temperature management system, delivering cooling water to the furnace shell’s cupro-nickel heat exchanging plates. The new No4 Blast Furnace has specially designed closed-circuit cooling water systems that are significant improvements from the previous blast furnace in terms of safety and reliability. The large volumes of water required are supplied via two 42" carbon steel mains,

Wayne Adams of Fairwood at Port Talbot

Fittings, including flange connections for the pump house, were also supplied by Pipe Center. Appropriately, steel for the pipe was made at Tata Steel’s plant at Hartlepool. Part of the successful programme completion was the coordinated communication between the Tata Steel Project Team, Fairwood Fabrications contract team and Pipe Center’s project department. John Walker, Pipe Center’s industrial sales manager, commented, “It is a superb project, and a credit to everyone involved. We have worked closely with Fairwood over a number of years, including a furnace rebuild at Port Talbot in 2001, and have developed an excellent working partnership.”

The project included 18 giant 36" high- pressure gate valves, sourced by Pipe Center from a leading international supplier. Fairwood Fabrications attended witness tests carried out on the valves by the manufacturer to 12 bar. The project required 150 cast iron gate valves in total, from 2" to 36", plus an assortment of standard non-return and butterfly valves. “All pipework had to be shot-blasted and treated with four layers of epoxy prior to fabrication,” said Wayne Adams, contract manager at Fairwood Fabrications. “Therefore it had to be supplied in a carefully staged sequence to our contractors, so they could carry out the preparation work before supplying to us. Pipe Center did an excellent job in managing the whole supply process, and we worked very closely with them at every stage of the project.”

Pipe center – UK www.pipecenter.co.uk

The Port Talbot steelworks

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