As a premium supplier to the compressor industry, we are committed to responding quickly and reliably to the needs of the market with taylor-made designs and new developments. For this reason, we operate an independent R&D/design and standardization department for all business areas of compressor technology. An important component of this is the proprietary design program KO³ - the benchmark of a modern compressor design tool for our piston and diaphragm compressors alike covering third party OEM licenses as well.
This program allows for designing all compressor configurations like horizontal opposed, vertical or V-type, and scenarios such as all possible stage arrange-ments or throw combinations with crossheads between cylinders as well as multi-service operations, side streams, fixed intermediate pressure levels and tail rod designs. To correctly predict the real gas behavior of all possible gases is a system immanent feature of this program too.
The ultimate requirement of any compressor design is reliability for decades of its operation. That’s why all measures must be taken to not overload any critical component. This is especially mandatory for designs acc. to API 618, we can fall back on in-depth know-how and experiences gained for. Hence, integral parts of the KO³ compressor design, calculation and analysis program are:
thermodynamics and compressor calculations
verification of compressor valves
rod loading by inertia, gas and combined loads
elasto-hydrodynamic (EHD) of compressor bearings
crankshaft strength and torsional analysis
acoustical pulsation study
fully automated design process
PanHandle diagram for varying pressure conditions
verification of measured rod loads and p-V charts
KO³ incorporates our comprehensive technical core know-how, culminating in the fully automated design process. This outstanding feature provides for three advantages: first, the overall order related engineering time is dramatically reduced, second, human errors by individual designs are excluded and third, standard design rules are followed. Hence, high reliability and save operation are the predominant characteristics our compressors are well-known for.
