Unitop makes inroads into new markets

An ISO 9001:2015 certified company, Unitop Aquacare is a trusted name in the field of caustic recovery plant and zero liquid discharge system with more than 450 clientele worldwide and a number of repeated orders.

The company is one of the leading engineering frms 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 set-ups are ISO 9001-2015 certified by DNV as well having fabricated equipment under stringent standard of 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. Our manufacturing system are approved/certified by international standard such as CE, SELO (China) NR 13 (South America) and ASME Section VIII.

0n 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 time bound 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 55,000 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 color 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 tailor-made systems to suit individual customer’s need and the local condition like quality of water, environmental impacts, space constraints, operational conditions, etc. Solution include:

Unitop Aquacare has an in-house developed programme for absolute tailor-made 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 China, Unitop Aquacare’s plants are successfully working at Lu Feng Company Ltd, Huafang Company Ltd, Esquel Textile Co Ltd, Toraq Jifa (Qingdoa) Textile Co Ltd, Shaoxing High Sun Apparel & Textile, Huafang Company Ltd, Lu Feng Company Ltd And Kaiping Panther Textile, which had Chinese or European CRP.

All these customers were either using European or Chinese CRP which required high steam requirement sometimes make it infeasible to run the plant.

Based on our presentation on steam saving they prepared to change the system to our CRP saving a lot of money due to lower operational cost, user friendly operation, reliability of performance and good local after sales service. In fact not just China but Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand has an over 70 per cent share of the market for CRP.

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

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 washing 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 color impurities such as Indigo and other dark colors 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.