Case Studie "Jebel Ali"

RUHRSTORF/DUBAI (Agg). – Dubai is developing its vision for the future with high speed and determination. A fascinating metropolis is emerging at the exact location where small fishing villages were located only a couple of decades ago. This change is largely facilitated as a result of the profit from crude oil exports. Among others, a new infrastructure in the service and tourism sector has been developed that sets new standards worldwide.

One of the most spectacular projects is beyond doubt the establishment of artificial islands along the Emirate’s coastline. In 2001, the construction work for the island “Palm Jumeirah” was started. By now, the project is almost finished. It includes numerous villas, shopping malls and luxury resorts. In the meantime, the construction of two further islands in the shape of a palm tree called “Palm Deira” and “Palm Jebel Ali” has started. Those two islands are to be even larger and more glamorous than “Jumeirah”.

One of the central topics of these ambitious projects is establishing a reliable technical infrastructure for the artificial islands, which includes the water and power supply for the newly build swimming cities. For this purpose, a combined power and desalination plant was especially designed for “Jebel Ali” to ensure long-term energy supply of the island. By combining those two plants, a highly advantageous efficiency is achieved, as the excess heat of the turbines can be used sensibly for the desalination of seawater. In this process, the water is first of all heated to a temperature of over 115 degree Celsius and is then cracked over various expansion stages at different compression ratios into saline and non-saline water. In doing so, the fresh water condensates in radiators that have been especially designed for that purpose and can finally be passed on as liquid. The residual saltwater is pumped back into the sea. As such, 70 Mio. gallons (approx. 318 Mio. litre) fresh water can be produced at the Jebel Ali desalination plant.

In order to be able to maintain an energy and fresh water supply even during a technical dysfunction, the power plant turbines are equipped with an emergency power unit. If necessary, all pumps, boiler units and other power plant buildings can be provided reliably with energy as well. The core of this emergency power plant is eight parallel connected generator sets that are able to provide a total output of 25,800 kVA in an emergency. The mechanical stress on the engines  is especially high in this case, since the generator sets are only used temporarily. The company AGGRETECH develops individual solutions  exactly for such complex operation purposes as this. The “Jebel Ali Project” has resulted from a long and good collaboration with the engine producer MTU, who made the first customer contact. After having designed the emergency power units , the generator sets were assembled and tested under extreme conditions at the company’s own test bench. There, the fine-tuning and optimization of the plant took place as well. By now, some of the generator sets have been shipped off to the Persian Gulf and await being taken into operation by the AGGRETECH technicians. The responsible project manager for Jebel Ali, Marcus Tauscher, says: “The customer made a deliberate decision in favour of a product “Made in Germany” because he trusts our highly advanced technology and extreme reliability. We are very proud of the award.”

Thanks to “Jebel Ali”, AGGRETECH won another large-scale project in the Middle East after having suppled inter alia the power plant Amman in Jordan and the desalination plant Barka in Oman with black start and emergency generator sets.