Seawater Cooling of Distillery Heat Exchanger - Long Coupled Centrifugal Pumps

Case Study Information

  • Industry: Engineering & Site
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Customer: Distillery

Application Sea water cooling of heat exchanger

Equipment Supplied: 2 x Self priming centrifugal pumps

Location: UK

Equipment supplied

2 x Azcue SP-AN Self Priming Long Coupled Centrifugal Pumps

  • Fluid: Sea water
  • Flow: 280m³/hr
  • Total head: 52m
  • Power: 75Kw
  • Voltage: 415v
  • Frequency: 50Hz
  • RPM: 1450
  • Execution: Horizontal
  • Pump casing: Bronze
  • Impeller: Bronze
  • Shaft: Stainless steel
  • IE2 Electric Motor
  • Motor fitted with anti-condensation heaters

Enquiry

Castle Pumps were approached by an engineering contractor that had been awarded the project of refurbishing a distillery. One of the key components that needed upgrading was the heat exchanger. The previous heat exchanger was using sea water for cooling, which was being fed by a standard end suction centrifugal pump that was being manually primed by the operator.

The distillery was experiencing a lot of down time due to the sea water cooling pump constantly losing its prime. An engineer frequently had to travel to the remotely located pump station and manually prime the pump, which was causing large overheads in terms of labour costs. It was crucial to the distillery that the new pump station was fully automatic and did not require an operator to manually prime the pump.

Self Priming Centrifugal Pump for Seawater Cooling

Key challenges:

  • Automatic priming to reduce manual worker intervention
  • Reliable use in continuous operation
  • Able to handle seawater without corroding over time

Solution

To meet the requirements of this application we selected AN long coupled centrifugal pumps from Azcue Pumps complete with an electric priming pump. We supplied these self priming centrifugal pumps in bronze, ensuring all wetted parts that come into contact with the seawater are non-ferrous and will not corrode overtime.  The twin bearing design of the long coupled pump also means that the strain of operation is shared, an important factor in increasing the life of continuously run centrifugal pumps

The electric priming pumps are activated by a pressure switch in the event that the pump loses its prime. This automated system ensures that no engineer needs to travel to the pump station to manually prime the pumps. To further prevent downtime of the sea water cooling pump station, we specified for two centrifugal water pumps arranged in a duty/standby operation. This provides a backup pump in the event that one should fail; the distillery therefore should not experience any downtime.

This is a robust engineered solution with many fail safes, the automatic priming and standby centrifugal sea water cooling pump should ensure that the distillery does not experience any downtime moving forward.