Giant reactor supplied for the petrochemical industry

600 tonnes, 33 metres long

02/11/2010

MAN Diesel & Turbo has recently delivered a petrochemical reactor weighing over 600 tonnes. The FCC reactor (Fluid Catalytic Cracking) is 33 metres long and has a diameter of around nine metres. It is one of the most important components of a petrol refinery and is indispensable for producing fuels such as petrol and diesel from crude oil. MAN Diesel & Turbo was commissioned by the customer not only with the construction of the FCC reactor, but as a specialist in refinery technology also with the detailed engineering of the complete FCC plant. The order is valued at around Euro 10 million.

The steel giant was produced over 18 months at the Deggendorf site and was loaded onto a river boat directly at the plant’s own quayside on the Danube. The 2,000 kilometre journey will take the FCC down the river, past Passau, Vienna and Budapest, to Constanza, the Romanian port on the Black Sea. There, the reactor will be loaded onto a heavy-lift vessel for sea transportation and will begin the second stage of its voyage to the Far East, where it is expected to arrive around four weeks later.

“The direct connection of the MAN Diesel & Turbo site of Deggendorf with the Danube, as an inland European waterway, offers a significant location advantage and excellent logistical conditions for safe loading and the economical transport of heavy apparatus – both down river to the Black Sea and up river, via the Main-Danube canal, the Main and Rhine rivers and on to the North Sea ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp. These are essential requirements for continuing to be successful in the global competition,” says Klaus Stahlmann, CEO of MAN Diesel & Turbo SE.

As well as building reactors, which are marketed under the product name “DWE Reactors”, MAN Diesel & Turbo also develops and produces other components at the Deggendorf site for large-scale specialist technology plants. Clients include companies from the chemical and petrochemical industry as well as international scientific research institutions. The company has supplied five giant ring magnets, for example, to the CERN particle physics research centre near Geneva. These so called barrel rings were developed and manufactured following many years’ work by MAN experts at the Deggendorf site. Each of these giant magnets weighs 1,200 tonnes – as much as 1,000 small cars.

MAN Diesel & Turbo, Press Release