The Duisburg
Mega Test Center,
revisited
Back in July 2008, Venture reported on the inauguration of the stunning new Mega Test Center —
the MTC — built as part of the facilities at Siemens
Oil & Gas international headquarters at Duisburg,
Germany. Now, just one year after its official opening, we re-visit the giant new Center to see if reality
has met expectations.
Designed to provide comprehensive test facilities for compressors
and their associated drive systems
in all sizes including the largest
machines currently designed and
built by Siemens the company’s
giant Mega Test Center has just
celebrated its very first ‘birthday’.
Inaugurated in March 2008, less
than two years after the first
earth-moving machines rumbled
onto the site, the MTC has seen a
full twelve months of engineering
activity and now presents a rather
different appearance to the vast,
almost-empty building which
welcomed the crowds of invited
guests during the opening
ceremony.
Heavyweight testing
The past year has been one of
continuously increasing activity,
with comprehensive testing successfully completed on no fewer
than seven compressor strings.
While at first glance this may not
sound like a particularly impressive number, bear in mind that
these ‘strings’, comprising the
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complete steam and electric drive
systems, massive multi-stage
compressors and all ancillaries,
including lubrication and coolant
systems, controls and instrumentation, can be as large as a
good-sized house, weigh in at
many hundreds of tonnes and
consume enough energy to power
a small town. Two of these seven
super-sized heavyweights from the
Siemens stable, developed and
built at Duisburg and tested in the
new MTC, were designed for air
separation applications. Two
further machine-strings were built
for use in natural gas liquefaction
(LNG) plants and the other three
compressor strings to complete
their test-regimes in the new
facility were designed for continuous-process applications in the
petrochemical industry and for
gas liquefaction.
Making it big in China
China’s huge coal deposits not only
make this black gold the most
important source of energy in the
country, but new technologies also
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Monitor
1
enable the production of liquid
fuels and a very wide variety of
chemicals from basic coal feedstock, offering increasing independence from crude oil and natural
gas. The two massive air-compressor-trains, which were assembled and recently completed
comprehensive operational testing
at the MTC, were ordered by Air
Liquide (Hangzhou) for the
Ningxia Coal Industry Group in the
People’s Republic of China, under a
contract worth some 25 million
euros. Currently being installed in
what will become the world’s
largest polypropylene plant,
operated by Shenhua Ltd and due
to start production later this year,
the two giant machine-trains each
consist of an STC-SR axial-radial air
compressor, an STC-GV (H)
final-pressure air compressor, and
an SST-600 steam-turbine drive
from Siemens’ Görlitz manufacturing center and all ancillary
systems and controls. Operating
rather like enormous refrigerators,
the compressor trains will be used
in air separation plants and will
each produce 3,000 tons of oxygen
per day. With a capacity of 700,000
cubic meters of air per hour, the
machines are themselves among
the largest of their kind ever built.
A third compressor string, built at
Duisburg and assembled and
tested in the new Center, is also
being shipped to Shenhua
2
International’s Yinchuan coal-tochemicals polypropylene plant.
Like the previous two machines it
comprises an STC-GV six-stage
integrally geared compressor with
an SST-600 steam-turbine drive,
but this third monster machine
train will form part of the main
fluidized-bed gasification process,
where coal is converted into
synthetic-gas feedstock. Designed
to compress 82,300 cubic meters of
carbon dioxide per hour to a final
pressure of 58 bar, the entire
machine underwent efficiencytesting at the MTC using CO2
test-gas in a closed-loop configuration, prior to being readied for
shipping.
Planned expansion
With the Mega Test Center currently operating at close to maximum
capacity, with some 20 machine
strings either on test or being
assembled, as one mega-machine
is shipped out another is being
readied to move in. While some
final commissioning work on the
existing building is still being
carried out, plans to expand the
facility are already in place. This
will not only include increasing
the number of highly qualified
test engineers at the Center, but
also extending its capabilities.
Believed to be the only facility of
its kind capable of supplying
steam at 100 bar/500°C at flow
rates up to 7,500 cubic meters per
3
4
hour to test advanced prototype
machines, it is planned to increase
flow rates still further to meet
customer requirements for even
larger and more advanced steamturbine drives. A separate gasturbine test facility is also being
planned, using shared facilities
including cooling systems, while
test facilities including large loadbanks are scheduled to meet
future needs for complete steam
and gas turbine generator sets.
With visitors from major international customers from the oil and
gas industry continually impressed
with the scale and range of expertise available at the MTC, reducing
on-site commissioning times and
reducing customer risk, its ‘mega’
future looks set to continue.
1A three-case (low/mid/highpressure) steam-turbine-driven
compressor string for an olefin
plant in the Persian Gulf region.
2During test drive: One of two
massive air-compressor trains
currently being installed in what
will become the world’s largest
polypropylene plant, located at
Yinchuan in China’s coal-rich
Ningxia region.
3A CO2 compressor for the main
fluidized-bed gasification process
at the Yinchuan propylene plant.
4Main refrigerant compressor
trains for an Indonesian mid-size
LNG plant — an emerging application in the oil and gas industry.
The MTC at a glance:
 Assembling and testing of up to six compressor trains
in parallel
 Full-load, closed-loop testing of compressor trains of up
to100 MW
 Part-load, open-loop testing of mega-scale compressors
ith electric motors of up to 100 MW;
w
with steam turbines of up to 35 MW;
 and with gas turbines of up to 160 MW.


 Direct access from heavy-load crane to jetty
May 2009 Venture 17
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