A cooling tower on the verge of collapse is not a maintenance problem. It is a production risk.
That was the reality at ENGRO Fertilizers' Dharki plant. Their 5 cell counter flow cooling tower was built on an aging concrete structure that had deteriorated badly. The tower was vibrating under load, at real risk of structural fallout, and one step away from an outage that could cost the plant billions of rupees in lost production.
ENGRO made the call to replace the entire structure with a fiberglass pultruded cooling tower, built to CTI guidelines. Fibre Craft Industries was brought in to design, manufacture, and install it, working inside a fixed 60 day plant shutdown window.
Concrete cooling towers age the way concrete always does. Years of constant water exposure, vibration, and thermal cycling had left this one structurally compromised, and a compromised cooling tower puts the whole plant at risk. ENGRO needed a full replacement, not a repair, and they needed it done inside their planned shutdown, known as the LTR, with zero tolerance for delay.
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FCI engineered and supplied a complete FRP pultruded counter flow cooling tower structure to replace the concrete cells, engineered for the following performance:
The scope covered the full structure and every internal component: fiberglass pultruded vertical columns, horizontal beams, and diagonal braces, splash fill panels, drift eliminators, louvers, a complete water distribution system with nozzles, fan deck, inspection platforms, casing sheets, deck railing, and staircases.
Several of these components, including the splash fill, nozzles, louvers, and drift eliminators, were developed from scratch by our in-house team, from design through mold manufacturing to production.
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Engro's shutdown window gave us 60 days to install and commission a brand-new cooling tower structure across all 5 cells, in a plant where every extra day offline meant real financial loss.
Based on standard field installation methods, Engro expected 3 cells to be achievable in that window. Getting all 5 done was, by their own estimate, not realistic.
We changed the approach instead of the timeline. Rather than assembling individual profiles inside the cooling tower cell by cell, which is the common method for field erected cooling towers, our team pre-built complete sub-assemblies off-site before the shutdown even began. When the plant went down and the old structure was dismantled, installation started immediately with finished sections ready to go up.
That single decision made the difference. All 5 cells were installed and commissioned within the 60 day shutdown, and the cooling tower has been in continuous operation since.
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ENGRO's cooling tower came back online fully rebuilt in fiberglass pultruded structure, with no cell left half finished and no extension to the shutdown. The project was inaugurated by ENGRO Corp CEO Ghias Uddin Khan, Vice President Engro Fertilizer Shahzad Nabi, and GM Engineering Syed Usman Aslam, who backed FCI's approach from the start.
This project reflects what FCI brings to large scale field erected cooling tower replacements: in-house design and mold development, our own manufacturing facility, and an installation team that plans around the client's real constraints instead of working around them.
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Talk to Fibre Craft Industries. We design, manufacture, and install FRP pultruded cooling towers for fertilizer plants, power plants, and heavy industrial facilities across Pakistan, engineered to get your plant back online on schedule. Contact our team to discuss your project.
