Since 1955, Aceros Inoxidables Olarra has been a leading producer of stainless steel wire and rod. Olarra has a long history of innovation, which has made the company one of the leading suppliers of stainless steel long products in Europe.
Olarra is a member of the Rodacciai group of companies. The Rodacciai Group of companies includes Rodacciai, Redaelli inox, Bullnava and Trafilerie San Paolo.
The pickling line at Olarra was approaching the end of its useful service life and was in need of upgrading and improvement. High maintenance requirements, limited productivity and extensive waste generation were all problems that Olarra needed to manage in their daily operations.
A new pickling line designed to alleviate the production challenges, high acid consumption and environmental concerns of the existing line was necessary. Reduction of waste acid and hazardous acidic metal sludge volume, lower neutralization and waste treatment costs, and increased productivity were the primary objectives Olarra set out to achieve.
Advising Olarra extensively on the new line design, Scanacon supplied state of the art acid analysis, filtration and recovery technology for the new pickling line – both for the preliminary H2SO4 pickling process and for the final HNO3-HF process.
The delivered equipment met Olarra’s objective to reduce acid consumption and waste generation and to increase productivity. Continuous removal of suspended solids from the preliminary H2SO4 pickling process using Scanacon’s ASRA system eliminates the need to dump and clean the process tanks, significantly improving line uptime while minimizing the need to manually handle this hazardous waste. Scanacon’s SAR ModuFlex technology has significantly reduced acid consumption by allowing Olarra to recycle the HNO3-HF pickling acids, while maintaining optimum process efficiency.
Scanacon supplied a complete acid management solution to Olarra including:
