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Richmond Industries Invests $150,000 in New Cooling System for Foundry Melt Operations

In April of 2017 Richmond Industries purchased an open fiberglass cooling tower along with a water-to-water plate and frame heat exchanger, including a dual filtration system and pumping module. Installation of the new system started during our summer shutdown, which began on July 24th.

The new closed loop cooling system will not only be more efficient, but will also reduce our maintenance costs while eliminating unnecessary downtime. The existing 18-year-old system used water to cool the furnaces and had many issues caused by poor water quality. 

The new system utilizes a water-to-water plate and frame heat exchanger installed inside the building. It will use cold filtered water from an outside open cooler made of fiberglass. The system has been sized to handle over 1750 KW of induction heat load that powers our six furnaces. Although the system still uses water to carry heat away from the furnaces, it will be a closed loop system on the furnace side of the cooling system, thereby eliminating plugging caused by contamination and poor water quality.
 
 “This investment will service our furnace and power supplies for many years to come,” explained Ed Chando, Richmond’s foundry manager.

This article was published in the Industry News of Metal Casting Design & Purchasing’s September-October 2017 issue.

Demand Control

In July 2015 Richmond Industries purchased and installed a demand management system from Powerit Solutions located in Seattle Washington. The Spara unit uses sophisticated load prediction and control algorithms, built in load shedding intelligence along with data drawn from our furnaces, utility meter and transmissions to optimize our facility energy use. The system utilizes integrated hardware and software that is connected to Richmond Industries power cabinets allowing for greater automation of its melting systems. This system along with a web based interface enables real time reporting and remote monitoring of our energy consumption.

Power Quality

Richmond Industries has just completed the first year utilizing the Hershey Electrical Power Quality System. This system uses capacitors, variable reactors, and a controller for power factor correction, phase balancing and voltage stability. The power conditioning is performed at the main buss of our transformer and has resulted in Richmond Industries increasing its overall power factor. In addition this system protects us from surge and transient issues, broadband harmonics mitigation, brownout protection and also helps to reduce our Carbon footprint.

We are currently scheduled to perform our annual PAP to insure that our system continues to provide Richmond Industries added protection.