For over 60 years, Steinmüller Africa has been a leading steam and high-pressure piping expert. The company leverages its extensive experience and in-house design and engineering to provide customised industrial shell and tube heat exchangers for sub-Saharan Africa’s oil & gas industry. The industry uses industrial heat exchangers for preheating, heating, steam generation, crude oil cooling, oil refining, and heat transfer.

Steinmüller Africa offers a comprehensive range of thermal, heat, sizing, and mass transfer services tailored to the oil & gas industry. Its expertise includes pressure drop analysis and vibration design, ensuring that its heat exchanger solutions meet the stringent demands of oil & gas operations. Its commitment to specialised services, optimum performance, technological advancement, and sustainability make it the ideal partner for oil & gas plants.

Industrial heat exchangers play an important role in improving the operational efficiency and safety of oil & gas processing plants. Their primary function is to transfer heat from one medium to another without the fluids coming into contact with each other. This process is necessary to maintain optimal thermal conditions, improve energy efficiency, minimise operational costs, and decrease environmental impact by facilitating efficient heat transfer.

Steinmüller Africa designs and fabricates turnkey industrial shell and tube heaters at its state-of-the-art facilities in Pretoria West and Sasolburg. To deliver world-class services, the company designs, manufactures, and installs industrial heat exchangers that meet the Heat Exchange Institute (HEI) and the Tubular Exchanger Manufacturers Association (TEMA) stringent design codes. The company also meets various health and safety standards such as SANS, BS, ASE, EN, and API.

Steinmüller Africa’s industrial heat exchangers are optimised to provide the smallest environmental footprint as well as the lowest mass for the given heat transfer duty. This is achieved through the company’s in-house developed solutions for material selection and heat and mass transfer coefficients. These are parameters used to quantify rates of heat and mass transfer between a surface and a fluid in contact with it. Phased Array Ultrasonic Testing (PAUT) and Radiographic Testing (RT) are used to detect flaws and examine the internal structure of the equipment accurately, ensuring its integrity before it is installed.

A unique aspect of Steinmüller Africa’s production capability is its licence to conduct explosive welding for industrial heat exchangers. The company uses explosive welding for the tube to the tube sheet joint and explosive expansion for the tube to the tube sheet joint. This allows for an extremely neat, clean, and safe weld, eliminating the risk of a tube bursting during operations and harming personnel and equipment. The same method is applied to the headers on the header-type heaters, speeding up the joining of these components and reducing the manufacturing period.

Steinmüller Africa uses a 3D parametric model, a computer-aided design (CAD) technique that allows engineers and designers to create and edit 3D equipment models before they are built. It also allows them to explore multiple design variations, enabling the engineers to streamline the iteration process up to ten times faster. This, in turn, allows them to optimise the manufacturing sequence, highlighting areas of concern for welders and boilermakers.

One of Steinmüller Africa’s advancements is procuring new tube and pipe bending machines that allow both sides of a tube to be bent at once. These machines can increase the overall length of a tube that can be bent, reducing the number of welds in the tube, and improving production efficiency. The company also uses the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University’s eNtsa laboratory, enabling them to use friction welding for heat exchanger nipples to the headers. This method, like explosive welding, offers a clean, fast, and safe weld with no defects and has the potential to replace the current arc welding method found in the industry.

Steinmüller Africa is the only Pressure Equipment Directive (PED) certified manufacturer of heavy, large, and high-pressure equipment in South Africa. This enables the company to export its high-quality products to the European Union.