As Plate & Shell Heat Exchangers gain acceptance in the process industry, many potential users are seeking validated performance data of the latest commercial plate technology so that they can be assured of adequate operation. HTRI, a leading source of process heat-transfer technology, is working with Vahterus to assess the PSHE performance for liquid-liquid and boiling service.

At the end of 2009, technicians at DONG’s combined heat and power plant (acquired by VEKS in May 2012), in Köge, Denmark, contacted one of our distributors about the replacement of an existing heat exchanger.

In order to build a safer tomorrow, both for the planet and for people, industries are creating new technologies and solutions. While change can take time, examples of positive trends can be seen in each sector. The rise of heat and exhaust recovery, for example, has been made possible and increasingly efficient by new product innovations.

Chemical and Process

Marko Rantala, Chemical and Process Business Director

As sustainability leads changes in the market, our Refrigeration Business Director Heikki Oksanen, Energy Business Director Tobias Häggblom and Chemical and Process Business Director Marko Rantala share their industry insights and discuss future outlook.

Chemical and Process

Marko Rantala, Chemical and Process Business Director

The welded plate pack is the core of the Vahterus heat exchanger. The welding is of the highest quality, ensuring maximum durability.

Without a plate pack, you wouldn’t have a heat exchanger, only a pressure vessel. Vahterus heat exchangers have no gaskets because their structure is completely welded. In order for the heat exchanger to work as planned, the welding must be of the highest quality. Vahterus’s welding engineer Tuomas Hokkanen and quality engineer Lassi Forsström explain that the key to ensuring this is continuous improvement of methods and strict quality control.

Like a multitalented master of ceremonies who makes sure that customers get the exact products they need, the project manager must be able hold all the strings and know when to pull the right ones.

”No two projects are ever the same because customer requirements vary. The challenge of the job is to produce a product that’s perfect for its purpose”, says Anna-Leena Huhta-Aho. Huhta-aho graduated from the Tampere University of Technology and has worked as a project manager at Vahterus for 11 years.

At Vahterus, summer holidays are coming to an end and our factory in Kalanti will be operating at full speed next week. We continue to run more or less as normal, and thankfully everyone is healthy.

In Finland, autumn and winter are long dark periods of the year when days are short. So everyone longs for the spring and summer seasons to start, and for the holiday to begin. In the Nordic region, it’s very common to have a four-week summer holiday.

A pioneer in refrigeration, John Wijbenga has devoted his career to understanding and developing systems with ammonia. At 72, he is still an active contributor to the industry and believes that the secret of success lies in carrying out ordinary daily activities unusually well.

Born in the Netherlands, John Wijbenga gained knowledge of construction work and material handling early, while working in his family smithy during his school years. He studied mechanics, energy production, controls and refrigeration before he began his professional life as a project engineer in industrial refrigeration, a job where everything he had learned seemed to come together.

While standards have helped the refrigeration industry to improve and set safety requirements, the International Institute of Refrigeration is proposing a working group to enhance refrigeration safety.

Over the last 150 years, we have learned how to use a number of different refrigerants. The first refrigerants were ammonia, ethers, methyl chloride, air and CO2. Later, hydrocarbons emerged, and in 1930s we saw the first series of CFCs, mainly R-11 and R-12, emerging on the market, followed by HCFCs such as R-22 and R-502. Of those refrigerants that preceded CFCs, only ammonia remained on the mainstream market, with CO2 and the hydrocarbons disappearing. Ammonia was used in large industrial systems in many countries because it was very energy efficient.