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Source: Tulsa World, Okla.自存倉Nov. 14--Need you ask how to move more than 27,000 cubic feet of heat exchanger down the road? Beyond careful is the easy and right answer.The Big Chiller is a gigantic air cooler that soon will be removing heat from compressed natural gas produced on offshore platforms before it is shipped by pipeline to the coast of Mexico.The unit weighs 180,000 pounds, is the size of six city buses and is made right here in Tulsa.Its manufacturer, Harsco Industrial Air-X-Changers, scheduled shipment of unit No. 3 on Thursday from its facility at the Tulsa Port of Catoosa. Otherwise known as the company's Model 204-3Z cooler, the units are 75 feet long, 25.9 feet wide and 14 feet tall."The last of these four chillers will ship directly to the Gulf of Mexico, but the first three will be stored on a 15-acre, secured, industrial storage lot south of Tulsa until their owner orders them sent to Houston," said Randy Benson, manager of product development and marketing for Harsco AXC."Each cooler is placed on an adjustable flat bed to accommodate its length," he said. "Once the units begin their trips to Houston, they each will take up to three days to arrive there."As the chillers take up two highway lanes and must share the road with normal traffic, transporters limit their drives to lesser-used state highways, avoiding interstates, and travel only during low-use periods, Benson said. The Big Chiller travels with an entourage of Oklahoma Highway Patrol escorts and pickup trucks heralding "OVERSIZE LOAD" to all passing and oncoming traffic.Harsco AXC bills itself as a leader in the manufacture of air-cooled heat exchangers for the natural gas industry and others since 1954.The four coolers are the largest ever made by the Tulsa-based company, Benson said."The customer's compressor packages are designed to handle huge amounts of gas," said Mik迷你倉 Thomas of Eads & Associates, the Houston-based sales firm representing Harsco AXC in the project. "Compression raises gas temperature, so cooling is very important."Our goal was to deliver units that would give the customer the greatest natural gas cooling capacity possible per square foot of available offshore platform space. The result was a cooler as large as road-shipping regulations allowed."The challenges of size were compounded by the coolers being designated for use in sour gas compression, meaning natural gas loaded with toxic hydrogen sulfide will flow through the unit. As a result, the coolers have to meet standards designed to eliminate leakage of toxins into the air."Strict weld inspection guarantees no-leak perfection," said Harsco AXC manufacturing engineer Allen S. James. "Manufacturing the headers and cooling tube assembly of each of these giant coolers requires 6,000 welds."Harsco AXC broke new ground, putting automated orbital welding technology from Maus Italia to work on the project. The company came to rely on this cutting-edge technology for most of the welds, James said -- with its top TIG (tungsten inert gas) welders driving the automated process."The Maus system cut weld time by over 50 percent with comparable improvements in weld quality," James said. "Like any other piece of automation, the Maus will do the same job over and over, hundreds of times, in exactly the same way."The Big ChillerDimensions: 75 feet long, 25.9 feet wide, 14 feet tallCubic feet: 27,195Weight: 180,000 poundsFan: Two 204-inch diameter bladesCapacity: Cools 100 million cubic feet of gas per dayTransport time from Catoosa to Houston: 2 1/2 to 3 daysPhil Mulkins 918-699-8888phil.mulkins@tulsaworld.comCopyright: ___ (c)2013 Tulsa World (Tulsa, Okla.) Visit Tulsa World (Tulsa, Okla.) at .tulsaworld.com Distributed by MCT Information Servicesmini storage