Heatric of Poole in Dorset designs and manufactures compact diffusion-bonded heat exchangers for offshore and onshore gas applications. As part of a £multimillion process order in the Middle East, Heatric constructed the exchanger cores from 6% molybdenum stainless steel for corrosion resistance to a sour gas working environment.
Redditch-based Harper and Simmons, a specialist toolmaking company with one of the most extensive large-capacity wire eroding facilities in the world, provided the chipless machining solution that Heatric required to guarantee clear small fluid flow channels, vital to the compact core design.Heatric believes it is the only company in the world capable of diffusion bonding stainless steel on such a large scale and that Harper and Simmons was the only supplier with sufficient capacity in size and quantity of wire cutting machinery to be able to meet the lead times and requirements of this Heatric project.
Almost 10,000 hours of cutting time were required for the project; 166,000mm being cut at a cutting speed of 0.3mm per minute due to the extreme thickness of the materials. Harper and Simmons’ facilities include what it believes to be the world’s largest number of super-size Hitachi bridge-type wire eroders under one roof; the only machines capable of accommodating the capacity and the weight of the Heatric components. In addition, heavy lifting craneage to transfer the non-magnetic material from machine to machine along with full toolroom back-up provided a turnkey solution for Heatric unavailable anywhere else in the UK or overseas.
“The innovative design of Heatrics’ heat exchange core and the wire cutting capacity of Harper and Simmons in supply partnership ensured the quality and delivery required for the end user,” says Michael Yorke, operations manager at Heatric.
Robert Simmons, managing director of Harper and Simmons
Robert Simmons, managing director of Harper and Simmons adds: “Conventional cutting forces produced by a milling operation would have been totally unsuitable for this particular job because of burnishing the flow channels. Wire eroding, on the other hand, produces a super precision slice to both ends of the heat exchanger leaving a completely clean core. At one point, most of our machines were cutting 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the needs of this one project. If there’s any doubt that British industry is dead, then here’s a great example to prove that is absolutely not the case.”Harper and Simmons’ state-of-the-art water jetting facilities, which include one of the few three-axis cutters in the UK, are also meeting the challenging cutting demands of Heatric’s exotic high-tech alloys.
http://www.engineeringcapacity.com/archive101/2009/december/industry_news/heat_exchanger_contract_is_a_joint_effort