Towers of strength Beroa Technology Group

TOWERS OF STRENGTH

The Beroa Technology Group specialises in the construction of chimneys and the installation of refractory linings for industrial furnaces. Joseph Altham reports on a company that has built up a global network of subsidiaries and is now making a vital contribution to the development of solar energy.

The Beroa Technology Group is a network of 50 different companies and is present in more than 20 countries worldwide. Beroa takes its name from “bero”, the Basque word for heat. Beroa’s main activities are the engineering and installation of refractory linings for furnaces and the design and construction of large chimneys and other tall structures such as concrete silos. The Beroa Technology Group was founded in 1997, but the origins of the company are much older and go back to the establishment in 1914 of the German firm Karrena. Beroa can therefore draw on decades of experience in the engineering and assembly of refractory material – material that is resistant to heat.

Many areas of industry require boilers and furnaces with refractory linings and Beroa works for many different customers. Its refractory linings are used in everything from rotary kilns for the cement industry to boilers in power plants. Another important business area is providing linings for the anode baking furnaces used in the aluminium industry. The company has successfully lined around 70 anode pit furnaces around the world, employing more than 20,000 tonnes of refractory material for the purpose. Beroa not only installs refractory systems for new furnaces, but also repairs and upgrades older equipment. For example, in Argentina the Group is currently engaged in the

reconstruction of an anode furnace for Aluar. The project at Puerto Madryn involves the installation of 4800 cubic metres of material and requires a labour force of 200 people.

Managing thermal energy

Beroa describes its core business as “managing thermal energy”. Heavy industrial applications, such as refractory linings for blast furnaces or chimneys for power generation, account for a large proportion of Beroa’s sales. Back in the 1970s, Beroa built the tallest chimney in Europe, a structure in Slovenia that is 360 metres high. More recently, Beroa’s German subsidiary, Beroa Deutschland, has won a big order from a steelworks in Duisberg, HKM. HKM has commissioned Beroa to build a new reinforced concrete chimney for the extension of its coke oven plant.

Beroa builds concrete chimneys using different types of material, such as steel or ceramics, for the internal flue. Challenging conditions like high winds make extraordinary demands of Beroa’s structural engineers, and the company’s construction methods have been proved in extreme earthquake regions such as Chile.

In 2008, Beroa acquired a controlling interest in Steelcon, a Danish company that builds industrial steel chimneys. Steelcon designs the chimneys according to the special requirements of the customer and makes them at its factory in Esbjerg before erecting them at the customer’s site. Like its parent company, Steelcon supplies total solutions to customers all over the world. Steelcon constructed two sets of chimneys for two district heating

power plants in the Moscow area and would like to take on more projects in Russia in the future.

Solar towers

Beroa builds other types of tall structure besides chimneys. Beroa companies have built storage silos for customers including British Sugar and Weetabix. Beroa also builds solar towers and is becoming increasingly active in the solar energy sector. Towers of this kind are positioned in the centre of a solar power complex and surrounded by heliostats (flat mirrors). The mirrors reflect the sun’s rays onto a receiver at the top of the tower. The heat collected by the receiver is then used to produce steam, which drives a turbine and so generates electricity. In 2005, Beroa acquired a controlling stake in the Spanish company, Altac. Altac has built two of Europe’s most spectacular solar energy towers, both located near Seville: the tower for the PS10 plant, which started producing electricity on a commercial basis in 2007, and the central tower for the Gemasolar power plant at Fuentes de Andalucia. The Gemasolar power station is a 19.9 MW power plant and its solar tower is 142 metres high. The plant began producing electricity in July 2011.

Future possibilities

One of the problems with renewable energies is that, unlike a coal-fired power station, they do not provide a constant supply of electricity. Solar power normally only produces electricity when the sun is shining, just as wind turbines can only generate electricity when the wind is actually blowing. The Gemasolar power plant offers a partial solution to this problem by using molten salt heat storage technology. Molten salt, heated by the solar tower’s receiver, is stored in the hot molten salt tank of the power station. This allows the surplus heat accumulated during sunny periods to be retained. The Gemasolar power station can therefore generate electricity without any solar feed for up to 15 hours at a time and can guarantee electricity production for a total of 6500 hours per year. For these reasons, Gemasolar represents an important advance in the commercialisation of solar energy.

Beroa still wins large contracts for work on coal-fired power stations. At the same time, the pioneering work of Altac is putting the Beroa Technology Group at the forefront of some of the most exciting developments in the field of renewable energy. n