BUTTING has recently supplied six giant pipes for the chimney of the auxiliary boiler equipment during the construction of a new hard coal power station in Hamburg. The new power station will produce 11 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year, enough to cover almost all Hamburg’s electricity needs, along with district heating for around 180,000 households. The pipes supplied by BUTTING have an external diameter of 1500mm, their individual lengths vary between 6m and 18m, and they form part of the chimney for the auxiliary boiler equipment. The oil-powered auxiliary boilers are used when the power station is first put into service and when both blocks of the power station have to be shut down for testing or maintenance purposes. The chimney has a total height of around 100m, and the BUTTING pipe giants, made from material 1.4571 make up about 80m of this. The pipes, equipped with compensators and brackets, are designed for waste gas temperatures of up to 500C and before being used, they are also provided on the construction site with 200mm thick insulation. On the spot, they are then fitted individually into the existing steel construction, so that the chimney, as it were, “grows along with the steel construction”. The individual pipe sections which follow one another are not screwed on, but completely welded to one another, which imposes particular demands on the on-site welders. They must weld the pipes together from within, and then can only leave them through exit gaps specially built in for that purpose. In a further stage of construction, the pipes in the chimney will be attached to the auxiliary boilers at a later date. This task too has already been assigned to BUTTING. The power station is planned for commissioning in 2012.
