Unitop Aquacare: A leader in caustic recovery plants

An ISO 9001:2008 certified company, Unitop Aquacare is a trusted name in the field of industrial evaporation and drying technologies with more than 400 clientele worldwide with a number of repeated orders. The company is one of the leading engineering firms with four decades of experience in heat transfer and process engineering projects for design, manufacturing, supply, installations and services.

Unitop Aquacare is promoted by SM Mondkar, a chemical engineering graduate from IIT Mumbai having experience of over 45 years in the process engineering industry.

Speaking on the quality control and international certification, Sanjay Sawant, Business Head – Exports, Unitop Aquacare—in an interview with the ITJ—said “All our manufacturing setups are ISO 9001-2008 certified by DNV as well approved/certified by various consultants like EIL, Mott Mcdonald, AKER solutions, TCE, Jacobs. Our manufacturing setups are equipped with automated machinery to cater to our customer’s needs, ensuring quality. We are equipped to provide our customer’s products of international standards like CE, ASME SECTION VIII, SELO.”

On manufacturing facilities and fabrication capabilities, Sawant said, “Our manufacturing unit is spread over 50,000 sq.ft and located in Thane, a close suburb to Mumbai. The fabrication, specialised QC and safety personnel are supported by skilled- and semi-skilled labour enabling us to meet timebound deliveries and quality standards. More recently, we have opened our new state-of-the-art manufacturing setup in Gujarat at a special economic zone, catering only for our growing export market. The factory is spread over 40,000 sq.ft. Both these unit together have a manufacturing capacity of up to 10 evaporations plants every month.”

“We have a professional team of over 40 engineers experienced in commissioning and supporting the clients,” added Sawant while speaking on aftersales service. “We have dedicated engineering staff to provide online support to our clients for their urgent requirements.”

Says Sawant, “Quick delivery and efficient aftersales service to our clients, irrespective of location have been our core focus and for that we have put lot of effects to impart technical training to our local representatives/channel partners as time is essence. We have dedicated expertise available on call to attend to problem solving on phone itself. We are in constant process to become an Indian multinational doing the better things in simpler way.”

He added that Unitop Aquacare has expertise to recover the caustic for denim and yarn dyeing mercerisation. “Waste caustic generated from these segment have lot of colour and size impurities and Unitop Aquacare has experience and know-how to make the recovered caustic reusable,” he said.

Advanced technologies and automation

Unitop Aquacare designs tailormade systems to suit individual customer’s need and the local condition like quality of water, environmental impacts, space constraints, operational conditions, etc.

• Total one-touch operation plant involving minimum manual intervention
• MIS daily reports in real time or history charts or graphics
• Plant analysis and troubleshooting module
• Report alert on Mobile or email
• Remote controlled operations

Unitop Aquacare has an in-house developed programme for absolute tailormade designs and ensuring optimum number of effects based on prevalent utility costs and its availability of the area. Customised designs ensure optimum operating and utility costs. Hot condensate is flashed in successive effects and the waste flash steam is used to preheat the weak lye resulting in major steam savings.

Market presence

Unitop Aquacare have made deep inroads in the European, Chinese, Turkish Bangladesh and Indonesia markets. In Turkey, Unitop Aquacare’s plants are successfully working at OZTEK, ARTA, KIPAS and JNR Group.

In fact, many customers from India, Bangladesh, China, Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia have even replaced their existing European, Chinese and Turkish caustic recovery plants and given preference to Unitop Aquacare purely because of low-operation costs, user-friendly machine, reliability of performance and good local after sales support.

Sawant further quoted, “We have got business from clients who were traditionally European machinery buyers and this was possible due to superior technological advancements.”

He adds, “We follow textile industry and our customers very closely. We identified that most of the textile are facing challenges to supply a constant higher pressure steam to any machine for that matter CRP. We have optimised our design to operate our CRP at low pressure keeping in mind interest and benefit of customer. We are always focused to design CRP it operates at low steam consumption and I proudly say that we are around 15 to 20 per cent lower than European competitor. We do it in an innovative way by flashing steam condensate to generate steam which is a heat source for preheating the feed.”

“Traditionally European CRP generates a lot of hot water, which around 2.5 times the feed capacity but since now-a-days most of the processing machines have in-built heat recovery systems, so consumption of all the hot water may be practically impossible. We even found that customers are draining the hot water which eventually spoils the ETP parameter. For such situation we offer customer CRP with Adiabatic System in that case CRP will not generate excessive hot water,” added Sawant.

New product development

Sawant was happy to share information on company’s new product plan with us.

He mentioned that Unitop Aquacare has a membrane technology that can remove the colour impurities such as Indigo and other dark colours from caustic so that the recovered caustic has improved properties. “All the necessary trails have been conducted and shortly they commercialised this new product,” he added.

Sawant concluded that Unitop Aquacare wants to be one step ahead of time.