Industrial Cooling Towers for a Steel Processing Plant in Sweden

1. Company and installation context

As SSAB‘s website explains, “The company is a leading manufacturer in the global market for advanced high-strength steels (AHSS) and hardened steels (Q & T), strip, plate, and tubular steels, as well as construction solutions. SSAB steels and services help make end products lighter and increase their strength and durability”.

SSAB, the company explains, has a cost-effective and flexible production system to produce about 8.8 million tons of steel per year. All with a focus on environmental sustainability as well.

The Swedish plants in Oxelösund are embedded in an integrated blast furnace process (from raw iron to steel blanks). At this plant, the outdated cooler needed to be replaced with a new one that would last and provide high performance for the entire process.

2. Proposed solution

The Swedish company CAM Preq, formerly known as C.A. Mörck, managed the project and relations with SSAB in Oxelösund:

• two industrial cooling towers type PMM C65;
• 9.3 MW to be disposed of;
• inlet and outlet water temperatures of 25.8 and 20°C respectively (with a wet bulb temperature of 18°C).

The PMM open-circuit tower is a modular system and suitable for medium- to large-scale plants. Fiberglass, of which all MITA industrial cooling towers are made, is also a durable material. Wide side accesses ensure easy inspection and maintenance.

Moreover, this is not the first supply of cooling towers, by MITA Cooling Technologies, for the steel industry. A significant project in Italy, for example, was the Rubiera Steelworks. In this case the customer’s different requirements, as to output water temperature and workload, called for the use of a smaller PME-E system (also open circuit).

3. Results obtained

One can assess the operational performance of the PMM industrial towers from the feed-back forwarded by SSAB to CAM Preq, as told by the Swedish supplier company itself: “The cooling towers are working perfectly so that continuous production operation is possible. Even the recent heat has not been a cause for concern: our engineering department, together with the supplier, have done a good job in system design and product selection”.