Dubai, UAE, 12 August 2018: The need for efficiency continues to be a major concern in view of the growing number of District Cooling plants across the GCC region. This has led to a demand for large cooling towers, customised to optimise power consumption, said Talal Damerchi, General Manager, Hamon Cooling Tower Company, touching on emerging trends, based on the company’s recent projects. “In Europe and other countries,” Damerchi said, “commercial businesses typically use small, packaged cooling towers. The savings in energy in small cooling towers may not justify the extra cost associated with more efficient field-erected designs required for large District Cooling plants.”

Damerchi said that the company leverages technical knowledge and experience gained from projects in the region to design cooling towers that address ambient temperatures, the high dust concentration, water quality and other concerns unique to the GCC region, as opposed to bringing in standard units designed for the conditions of other countries, which may be oversized and lead to greater power consumption than necessary, even if they are certified by third-party agencies. “Some people here confuse the agency approval as a mark of quality,” he said. “These agencies are the first ones to tell you that an approval stamp is not a mark of quality, rather it is a certification of performance and operation of a specific design and composition, which may or may not fit the GCC conditions.”

Noor Sankary, Regional Sales Manager, Hamon Cooling Tower Company, weighed in: “We treat each project as unique, we don’t just supply standard, off the shelf and tell the client to operate it without matching their requirement and we always update the environmental parameters.” Sankary said this is crucial, as the wet-bulb temperature constantly changes and the standard unit cannot adjust to it. “In standard units, the engineering is already done,” he said, “but our engineering is always updated with new parameters, whether environmental, regulatory or [as per] company requirements.”

Damerchi said he has also seen greater compliance with stricter regulation on water consumption. “In the UAE, we are not allowed to use anything other than Treated Sewage Effluent,” he said, providing an example. “This is spreading to other places, which is a good trend. We are also seeing more focus on quality of water being used. Better filtration of water coming into the cooling tower leads to better quality water to maintain the fill in optimum condition and to prevent scaling, which would otherwise reduce the efficiency.”

Damerchi said that the importance of customisation is even more vital in projects related to the oil and gas sector, which, he said, has strict requirements. In such projects, he said, the company leverages the experience from working with stakeholders such as Adnoc, Aramco and Perojet, as well as from international project references. Sankary said this is consistent with the company’s history of providing industrial cooling towers for the mining and power sector, and added that most of the cooling towers in the nuclear developments in France, as well as those in Électricité de France (EDF), are supplied by Hamon.

Shifting the attention to recent projects in the region, Sankary said Hamon is supplying to Imam University, Jubail University, GAC Riyadh and Fadhili Plant in Saudi Arabia; Dubai World Trade Center, EXPO 2020 projects, Night Market in Jumeirah Village Triangle, Al Khail Avenue and Mirdif Hills in UAE; Angola Soyo 75 in Angola; Sohar Plant in Oman, and Burullus Power Plant in Egypt. Sankary added the company is also in the process of executing a project in Pakistan for a fertiliser plant, where it is a complete system including cooling towers, pump, side stream filtration and related systems. The company has also just completed a similar project in an oil field in the south of Iraq, he said, emphasising that the company utilises a local engineering team in the UAE, for such projects.

Hannah Jo Uy is Assistant Editor at Climate Control Middle East magazine. She may be contacted at hannah@cpi-industry.com