Design and manufacture of first SCR economisers in UK won by Ekstroms / A&J partnership
Ratcliffe-on-Soar is one of the most efficient coal fired power stations and the first large scale commercial project running on pulverised coal in the UK. With a total generation capacity of 2,000MW from four 500MW units it produces enough electricity to meet the needs of approximately 2 million people.

Having opted in to the large combustion plant directive for 2016, the plant has to meet stringent emissions targets on greenhouse gases and has been the first to turn to the latest generation of selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology to achieve these targets.

Working in a similar fashion to the catalytic converters fitted to combustion engine vehicles, the combination of active precious metals within the SCR unit is capable of reducing Nitrogen Oxide emissions by a factor of 80-90%. To work efficiently however, these units need to receive combustion gases at precise temperatures and this requires a total redesign of the traditional economisers fitted at Ratcliffe.

Each of the existing economisers has to be removed and replaced with two individual units. The first of the new economisers must accurately reduce the combustion gas temperature to the optimum level prior to entering the SCR unit. A second economiser is then positioned after the SCR to extract residual heat from the combustion gases.

Gas distribution and temperature are critical to the SCR process and A&J Ekstroms is one of the very few companies capable of economiser design at this level. Ratcliffe is the first power station in the UK to follow the SCR route and we started discussion with the project’s main contractor, Doosan Babcock, some 3 years ago.

The overall project will take until 2014 to complete, with 2 economisers to build and install for each of the 4 generating units at the station.

The contract, secured by Ekstroms Sweden against strong competition from Europe, China and Australasia, will be project managed in the UK by A&J Ekstroms with all fabrication, testing, inspection and delivery being carried out by A&J Fabtech.

It was this ‘locally centred’ service throughout the entire project allied to Ekstroms design expertise and class-leading finned tube technology that enabled us to win this ground-breaking contract.

As a ‘first of its kind’ in the UK, this project will be under close observation as other coal-fired generators look for their own emissions solutions prior to the 2016 directive implementation.