Seawater cooling for the ULC Steel programme

The problem

Tata Steel IJmuiden is rebuilding around ultra-low-carbon steelmaking. That change moves the plant's thermal load, and the cooling system has to be sized for a process envelope that is still being defined while the engineering runs.

Seawater makes it harder. The circuit has to survive a corrosive medium, tidal variation and environmental limits on discharge temperature, while sitting inside an operating works with no spare space.

What we did

We took the structural and piping scope: buildings, pipe racks and the complete piping engineering with its support structures. The work ran alongside the process definition rather than after it, so the layout absorbed changes to the cooling duty as they landed instead of being redrawn each time.

Piping was designed to code with stress analysis and support design, and the pipe rack structures were engineered for the loads and thermal movement the circuit imposes.

Outcome

A cooling system engineered as one package, with the structures, the piping and the tie-ins closed together. The same team carried the work across three years of programme changes, which is the part that usually costs money when it is split between firms.