Situation

An international chemical company has a large production site in Rotterdam. There, the company makes thermoset resins that can be found in all sorts of end products, such as cars, wind turbines, electronics, aircraft and buildings. At the Rotterdam location, there are a number of continuous plants and an in-house Research & Development Lab. The factories have been in existence for several decades and, in recent years, KH Engineering has carried out several modernisation projects for the company. Until now, the company buildings, including the control room, were heated with process steam. In order to make its operations more sustainable, the company wanted to start using heat recovery, and eventually heat pumps. But how do you tackle such a project?

Solution

In order to carry out the project and all the necessary intermediate steps safely and thoroughly, the chemical company called on the combined knowledge and skills of KH Engineering and PDE. For many years, PDE has specialised in high-quality climate installations in special places, where the circumstances require that extra attention be paid to the HVAC systems. Think of a drilling rig, a floating gas production platform, the largest Ferris wheel in the world in Dubai. And therefore also a Dutch chemical plant. For this assignment, PDE worked together with KH Engineering.

They started by mapping out the necessary information on the climate systems by looking up documentation and mapping out the situation on site. This was quite a job, as some of the systems had already been installed several decades ago. Then attention shifted to making the installation suitable for the use of heat pumps. PDE did this by installing heat recovery on the main air treatments and on those of the laboratory. For example, various pipelines had to be rerouted over dozens of metres, because part of the air handling unit is located forty metres from the to be heated building. In this way, the engineering firm freed up capacity on the existing heat exchangers to cope with a lower water temperature. This was followed by the installation of the heat pumps and the adjustment of the systems to these. This way, the entire building has now been converted to a modern and “green” system.