Spirotech’s biggest ever SpiroCross has been installed in the Ukraine.
The enormous dirt and air separator, some 10.8m tall and with a dry weight of 15 tons, was designed and engineered to fit inside a newly-constructed grain drying plant.
Looking like the tank on a fuel tanker lorry, the bespoke SpiroCross was transported on the back of a heavy-duty trailer around 1,900 kms from Helmond in The Netherlands to its destination in the Zhytomyr region, around 100 kms south east of Kiev.
Ukraine is known as the ‘granary of Europe’, with its thousands of square kilometres of grain fields.
The giant SpiroCross was commissioned by Spirotech partner Wilo Ukraine, part of the global Wilo group, a leading manufacturer of high tech pumps and pump systems.
The Ukraine installation, XCS1000FAO1 to give it its official product designation, has a capacity of more than 30,000 litres of water. The heating system it has been installed into has six separate 15 megawatt boilers, two gas and four solid fuel, and the water flow and temperature must always be in balance, independent of how many boilers are in operation at the time.
This meant Spirotech had to develop a completely new design to ensure hydraulic balancing. The SpiroCross has different connections on the primary and secondary sides; DN1000 on the boiler side and DN1200 on the technology side.
The Spirotube inside it, developed using computational fluid dynamics to ensure minimal mixing, is also a record-breaker. It stretches 4.5km, requiring a staggering 800km of copper wire – the approximate distance from Helmond to Paris and back.
Arno de Korte, Spirotech Area Sales Manager, said: “There are some impressive figures to match an impressive unit. It was really brilliant that we were able to deliver this project.
“While our commercial product range is ever evolving to match market requirements, we are very proud that we have the expertise and capability to design and engineer bespoke projects such as these. It is the biggest we have ever built.”
Gennadiy Pobereznichenko, Chief of Regional Sales for Wilo Ukraine, said: “This project is very interesting from a technological point of view. The SpiroCross XC1000F is the largest hydraulic ‘shotgun’ in the world, in which the alignment of the heat flow is extremely important.
“Specialists in the team at Spirotech were able to model the operation of the system, including a hydraulic shot, in order to check the reality of their calculations before moving on to design the device for its specific task.”
While the giant SpiroCross has been installed, it will not become active until summer 2018 when the next corn harvest is due.
For more information on the Spirotech range, visit www.spirotech.co.uk
