KELVION THERMAL: Kelvion Thermal Is Hot Property

When Otto Happel senior opened the doors of Gesellschaft für Entstaubungs-Anlagen (GEA) in Bochum in 1920, surely even he would have struggled to imagine the extent of the success story that would result from the foundations he had laid.

“Kelvion today is a global player in the heat exchanger business with over 5,000 employees and 47 locations worldwide,” the company reveals, capturing a highly diversified range of market segments including energy, chemical industries, oil and gas, HVAC and refrigeration as well as the food and beverage industries.

Since 1920 the company has manufactured and marketed a vast range of products including plate heat exchangers, shell and tube heat exchangers, modular cooling tower systems and refrigeration heat exchangers, and since November of 2015 this has been performed under the newly-realised Kelvion brand. “It has been a long journey from starting as GEA back in 1920 to becoming Kelvion in 2015,” the company says today, one which has been replete with many milestones including the development in 1935 of air-cooled condensers for stationary steam turbines.

“Our specialised professional competency, solidly-based expertise, customer proximity and multidimensional product portfolio make Kelvion the partner of choice in the field of heat exchange. Kelvion is a specialist in providing customer-specific products and services and supports its target customers throughout a global sales, service and production network.”

CENTURY OF TECHNICAL INNOVATION

Otto Happel senior, himself a visionary entrepreneur with exceptional technical skills and knowledge, founded GEA at the age of just 34 in Bochum, a city famous for engineering and, in particular, mining and steel production. Seeking to propel technical innovations forward right from the off, he presented the first closed circuit cooler with elliptical finned tubes just two years into the company’s decorated lifetime.

“Many other product innovations followed,” Kelvion describes, “including the air condenser in 1935; the gap left behind when Happel died in 1948 was all the greater.” Following the milestone in GEA’s history in 1989 of the company going public, in 1999 it was acquired by mg technologies AG and renamed the GEA Group in 2005. Growth continued, and to combat the resulting overlaps GEA to reorganised into clearly defined segments, the largest of which was Heat Exchangers (HX).

In 2013 the decision was made to sell this highly lucrative segment, which had grown somewhat misaligned with the original corporate competencies. In October 2014, the investment company TRITON Investment LLP bought the operation to become a jewel in the newly formed Kelvion group, adopting the name created in tribute to Lord Kelvin, the British engineer, mathematician, and physicist who formulated the laws of thermodynamics and absolute units of temperature. A year later, the Heat Exchangers segment became an independent company. “As Kelvion,” the company proudly states, “it has been writing its own history ever since.”

South African operations commenced in 1975, and the company has remained at the forefront of the heat exchange industry in large part due to a team of skilled and loyal employees, high product quality, steadfast customers and a continued investment in people, manufacturing processes and product technology.

In November, Kelvion announced another significant landmark in its timeline, a portfolio and leadership transition seeing the company spin-off its Thermal Engineered Solutions (TES) Business Unit and a change in leadership, with Andy Blandford succeeding Jürgen Vinkenflügel as CEO of the remaining Kelvion business in a planned transition.

“My passion for Kelvion, with its 100-year history, our employees and our customers have been my main drivers throughout the years,” announced Vinkenflügel on the eve of the change. “Together, we have achieved a lot, building a solid momentum and two strong growth platforms around Kelvion’s Product and Project businesses.”

Andy Blandford joins Kelvion from DEMATIC, the world’s leading provider of supply chain solutions, and brings an enormously relevant industrial background to drive the next phase of Kelvion’s corporate development with an emphasis on profitable growth, innovation and operational excellence.

“The Kelvion team has developed a profitable growth strategy which I have reviewed and fully support,” Blandford detailed. “Kelvion has many strengths to build upon: relentless customer focus, high quality and innovative product offerings, operational excellence, efficient support functions and growth in after-sales.

“These strengths are mission-critical pillars to further solidify our position in the marketplace and to ensure that our company succeeds in the long term. I am very excited to support Kelvion and the whole organisation to deliver the defined strategy and our financial targets in the years to come.”

GLOBALLY CRITICAL APPLICATIONS

“The industries in which you and we together operate are among the most important in the world,” Kelvion outlines, “power, the oil and gas industry, the chemical industry, transportation and marine applications, heavy industry, food and beverage, sugar, refrigeration and HVAC. We provide every single industry segment with solutions of outstanding efficiency, safety, and sustainability.”

Embodying this for Kelvion is its K°Bloc Heat Exchanger, the fully-welded plate heat exchanger upgraded and refined in 2020 to further enhance its reliability and efficiency. Designed and made in Germany, K°Bloc is designed to work across a broad range of liquids, temperatures and pressures and is suited to the demands of the oil and gas, chemical and petrochemical industries for separating mixtures of oil, water and solids.

“K°Bloc is the result of decades of experience with demanding applications, more than 30 years of welded plate heat exchanger expertise and a commitment to continuous product improvement,” Kelvion underlines.           

Looking forward to its next 100 years, the key word for Kelvion is growth, and not least with regard the heat exchanger industry itself. Estimated at USD 15.6 billion in 2021, it is projected to further swell to reach USD 19.9 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 5.0%, and Kelvion’s numerous subsidiaries all over the world make it perfectly positioned to capitalise on the wealth of opportunities set to arise.

Rapid industrialisation in developing economies will see a boost in demand for heat exchangers, particularly the likes of India and China, while employment in various end-use industries such as chemical, HVACR, petrochemical, and oil & gas industries is expected to swell the market in the Asia-Pacific region. Government initiatives for the development of thermal and solar energy in countries such as Japan and India are also impacting positively on the heat exchangers business, due to their application in power generation plants, and likewise a further increased demand for petrochemical products. 

“Gazing into the future, wherever you look, it’s all about growth,” the expert in heat exchange remarks, “We were always there – in the beginning of modern industry, of global production and hi-tech development,” Kelvion summarises of its history, and with its own areas of expertise aligning so succinctly with the abundant opportunities in this burgeoning market, the company will be a central force in global progress.

“We will grow further in the future, and we have the answers and the technology for mega trends, growing population, growing need for energy and growing responsibility for corporate behaviour.”