6 minute read
Specialists in cooling technology Nissens
SPECIALISTS IN
COOLING TECHNOLOGY
The Danish company Nissens A/S is a major manufacturer and supplier of cooling solutions for the wind turbine industry. The company also manufactures radiators, oil coolers, heat exchangers, charge air coolers and condensers for the automotive sector and produces complete cooling solutions for various industrial applications such as excavators, generator sets and mining and forestry equipment. However, the most significant part of the group’s future growth is expected to derive from the wind industry segment. Joseph Altham reports on the opportunities for the company in renewable energy.
Alan Nissen is the CEO of a company that was founded by his great-grandfather, Julius Nissen, in 1921. Nissens began by making car radiators and is now one of Europe’s largest manufacturers and suppliers of engine cooling and climate products. From the 1980s, under Alan Nissen’s direction, the business diversified and began to produce cooling solutions for a broader range of machines. Nissens today has two divisions, one for automotive spare parts and another for wind and special machinery applications, named Nissens Cooling Solutions, which makes customised cooling
solutions for manufacturers of wind turbine generators, busses, earth-moving machines and other on- and off-road machines. The company employs around 800 people and has an annual turnover of app. €120 million. “We started as a local company in Denmark, but over the last decades we have developed into a global company with production plants in Denmark, Slovakia and China,” stated Mr Nissen. “We decided to build our factory in Slovakia in 2003, and it was ready by 2005, and it has actually been expanded several times since then. We need a factory in China because our biggest customers are expanding into China and want us to serve them in the region from the region.”
Offshore wind
Denmark is famous for its pioneering role in the renewable energy industry. Nissens Cooling Solutions moved into wind power as long ago as 1988 and produces cooling systems for wind turbine generators. As a wind turbine generates electricity it also produces heat. A wind turbine therefore needs a cooling system to cool the generator, along with the gearbox, converter, transformer and hydraulics. Customers include the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturers like Vestas Wind Systems and Siemens Wind Power. Cooling systems from Nissens can be found in nearly all offshore wind farms like Horns Rev, off the coast of Denmark, and the Thanet Offshore Wind Farm, which is located off the Kent coast. Nissens had by the end of 2010 delivered coolers for almost 3000MW out of a total installed global capacity of around 3300MW.
Nissens offers customised cooling modules and indirect complete cooling systems for on- and off-road applications. “Most of our on- and off-road customers buy a complete cooling module including steel parts, fans, motors, etc, and we see an increasing interest for our indirect cooling systems combined with our water-cooled charge air cooler, named WCAC,” said Thomas Juul Eilersen, the company’s vice-president for sales and projects. The indirect cooling system consists of a low and a high temperature radiator which cools part of the machine indirectly through e.g. a water-cooled charge air cooler (WCAC) and aluminium heat exchangers. The indirect cooling system has several benefits such as reduced complexity in the front-end cooling module, optimised dimensioning through sharing of a pooled cooling capacity, faster response from the charge air cooler and up to five per cent lower fuel consumption.
Nissens also offers complete cooling systems including pump stations, heat exchangers, hoses, valves, etc that cover all the cooling requirements of a modern wind turbine. “We aim to provide both integrated cooling systems and individual cooling components,” said Anders Allesø, research and development manager at Nissens. A wind turbine may look simple from the outside, but the technology inside the nacelle (the housing at the top) is complex and has to function in demanding conditions. It is often difficult to reach an offshore wind turbine to carry out maintenance work, so the cooling systems from Nissens must be extremely reliable and are designed to have a lifetime of at least 20 years.
Nissens sees a trend towards passive cooling in the wind industry where the coolers are mounted on top of the nacelle without any forced ventilation. Passive cooling takes advantage of the speed of the wind and thereby decreases the power consumption from the fan to zero. Intelligent and smart cooling is about looking at the total cost of ownership, i.e. all the end users costs including operation and maintenance cost. With passive cooling and the correct control of the cooling system’s pumps and valves Nissens ensures the optimum cooling set-up for their customers.
During the last couple of years, Nissens has launched a new aluminium plate heat exchanger, a water-cooled aluminium charge air cooler (WCAC) and a new water pump station concept. In early 2012, Nissens will bring out the new AluXStream radiator which is an improved cooling system that employs a special design of aluminum
Low-temperature radiator
High-temperature radiator WCAC - Water-Cooled Charge Air Cooler
Water-oil heat exchanger
Water-oil heat exchanger
cooler, rather than the traditional ‘plate and bar’ type. The AluXStream enables a significant reduction in weight.
Markets
Nissens exports over 90 per cent of its output. Within Europe, the company’s main markets include Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. “Our cooling systems tend to be highly customised,” stated Thomas Juul Eilersen. “Customers will involve us during the design of a new product and ask us to develop a prototype of the cooling system. Nissens Cooling Solutions focuses on a special segment of the market. Typically we develop coolers for the kind of machine of which no more than 5000 units will be produced every year. That means that we are continuously working with customers on developing new and innovative cooling solutions.” Nissens’ factory in China is a new development. The result of some €10 million of investment, the factory at Tianjin will be capable of developing cooling systems for the company’s customers in China and will begin production in 2012. In renewable energy, the market in China is growing fast, as Mr Nissen explained. Nissens sells to the majority of leading wind turbine manufacturers and is seeing increasing interest from the large Chinese OEMs in the wind industry segment, like DEC and Goldwind. “We are a major supplier of cooling systems for the wind power industry and expect a lot from the Chinese market. In wind power, China has become the biggest market for new capacity,” said Mr Nissen. Meanwhile, Nissens is weighing up the business case for a fourth factory in the United States, where the wind energy sector is also growing fast. n
Pumps and valves for efficient use in wind energy
As a world market leader KSB serves the market with pumps and valves for various applications including wind energy. With more than 15,000 KSB employees, over 160 service centers and 30 production sites around the world, we draw all our strengths in safe, efficient and sustainable solutions. Regarding wind energy KSB delivers pumps and valves for wind turbines, offshore substations, coastal grid connections and jack-up vessels for cooling circuits, seawater intake, fire-fighting, pressure boosting, cleaning and auxiliary systems. Etaseco is a canned motor pump for cooling systems working leakage free, without pressure losses and providing long service intervals. The light weighted and space saving design is well proven in applications with similar tough requirements. More than 25.000 pumps are running successfully in the train industry without failure facing temperatures up to -40°C.
