Featured Story – Vermeer Eemhaven International: a heat exchanger maintenance knowledge center since 1955

When it comes to talking about what makes us unique,” says Bert van den Heuvel, Manager Engineering, “one of our biggest advantages is our expertise. We are definitely a maintenance knowledge center and are renowned for this. We’re also a very experienced team. Our engineering team has been in the design business for thirty plus years. Moreover, as a company – technical staff and management – we form a happy and flexible working team. Employees tend to stay a long time when they join us.”

“Just as important,” joins in Joffrey Hagendijk, Manager Operations “is that we can realize very short turnaround times because of the efficiency we have introduced into the factory. This has been partly achieved by robotizing all our repeatable production processes with state-of-the-art CNC machines, which have additionally solved the difficulty of finding new, skilled technical staff as our older employees reach retirement age.”

Production turnaround times have likewise been tightened up by the company’s use of the production planning tool ‘Primavera’. This has enabled them to make a very detailed overview of both human and machine resources as well as the status of all parts and deliverables when setting up a complicated production schedule. Nothing is overlooked and the planning is continually updated. “In this way,” says Joffrey Hagendijk “we avoid starting to build before everything is in place, ensuring no time is wasted. Moreover, because we keep close tabs on the time spent carrying out each phase of a build we know exactly how long every job takes. This allows us to continually improve the accuracy of our timing on jobs, resulting in ever tighter and achievable turarounds. Our end-user clients around the world know that when they need a heat exchanger delievered with a very short delivery schedule, we will achieve it.”

Apart from these factors Vermeer is fully equipped to build complete heat exchangers. The company is not dependent on sub-suppliers, which enhances turnaround times and indirectly ensures that a lot of re-tubing project work comes their way.

“One of our advantages is that we have a relatively ‘flat’ form of management,” adds Maxim Schouten. “The management team walks around the factory and talks to the technical staff and listen to their ideas to improve processes. We take their thoughts onboard when making decisions. As such all are highly motivativated because we all can and need to improve and change our organization.”

Certainly the company’s in-house engineering is also a key to company success providing customer-tailored solutions and in-depth technical know-how. All designs are drafted in 3D using the software package ‘Solid Edge’. The department’s own in-house capabilities are also backed up by engineering staff working from Mumbai in India – a liason which has been running since 2009, and to facilitate cooperation all Indian staff have been trained in all aspects of the in-house engineering team’s work.

“Whenever we get a new order we always hold a kick-off meeting to launch the project and set up a tentative planning. In this way we can already begin to outline project deadlines and make sure they can be met. As a department we, moreover, are capable of working with many different design codes like ASME Section VIII, Division 1, the Dutch rules for pressure vessels (RToD), the Euro norm EN13445, and the German codes AD2000,” says Bert van den Heuvel.

“We tend to concentrate on the production of high-quality, well-defined products in standardized forms, continues Maxim Schouten. “However, to succed in today’s markets, this is often not enough. Pricing also needs to be very competititve. The European heat exchanger market is tight and economically challenging. In recent years many companies have had to offer products below cost value to keep afloat whilst the lower grade heat exchanger markt is now largely in the hands of India, South Korea, and China. Our success has come by concentrating on the top-end of the market: productions in monel, hastelloy, stainless & duplex stainless steels, titanium, copper, & copper alloys,and coldrolled steels, high pressures equipment, and special technologies. Our product range covers: condensers, reboilers, airfin coolers, U-bundles, helixchangers® and airfin collers, transfer line exchangers, texas towers, and helitowers. Other process equipment we offer is valves and filtration.

Vermeer has been a Lummus Technology licensee since 1996, with a license to build and sell HELIXCHANGER heat exchangers. This enhanced heat transfer technology is applied to provide solutions for common issues of conventional shell & tube exchanger such as shell-side fouling, optimal pressure drop utilization, and flow induced vibration. In the HELIXCHANGER heat exchanger, quadrant-shaped baffle plates are placed at an angle to the tube axis in a sequential arrangement to create a helical flow pattern around the tubes. This provides more supports to the tubes which means lower vibration potential and more importently a higher average shell side velocity that may increase heat transfer, allows more throughput for the same pressure drop, and reduces shell side fouling rate. They are also friendly to the environment. The technology offers a lower lifecycle cost solution whether the customer’s needs are to extend the operating period between cleaning campaigns of crude preheat exchangers, reduce capital costs, or improve the energy-efficiency of feed/effluent towers. In many cases such heat exchangers have increased efficiencies between 15–20% whilst fouling rate has been drastically reduced thus lowering user’s greenhouse gas emissions. The technology can replace conventional shell & tube heat exchangers in grassroots, replacement and retrofit markets in many applications, and Vermeer is one of the market leaders in this range, having built over 350 of them.