Emerson Opens $30 Million Global Innovation Centre
May 11, 2010
Emerson Process Management has opened the state-of-the-art Emerson Innovation Centre in Marshalltown, Iowa. This $30 million investment is designed to help customers tackle the toughest engineering challenges facing today’s process manufacturing and energy industries.
The world’s appetite for energy is driving the development of next-generation nuclear plants, mega-train liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants, and large oil and gas refineries, which require larger capacities and highly engineered control valves and instrumentation. The 136,000-square-foot Emerson Innovation Centre is designed to help companies deliver record volumes of natural gas and other forms of energy and consume less in the process, reducing costs and making plants run quieter and with reduced greenhouse emissions.
The centre is home to the world’s largest “flow lab” that, for the first time, enables large valves to be tested in real-world plant conditions to ensure production reliability, efficiency, environmental compliance, and safety before being installed at a customer site.
Steve Sonnenberg, president of Emerson Process Management, says that no other facility in the world can do what this centre can do – from seismically qualifying a 35,000-pound control valve to testing a two-story-tall valve that controls the flow of feedstocks for a petrochemical plant. “This $30 million investment in innovation directly reflects Emerson’s commitment to helping our customers run smarter plants that improve production quality, lower operations and maintenance costs, and enhance environmental performance and worker safety.”
Emerson, whose Fisher valves are installed in more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear facilities, is able to provide seismic qualification of its valves at the new Innovation Centre, which is critically important to making nuclear plants safe and reliable during earthquakes.
The centre’s flow lab has enough capacity to fill an Olympic-sized pool in just over eight minutes, or a Goodyear blimp in about 12 seconds. Control valves can be tested at pressures up to 3,500 psi (pounds per square inch), the equivalent of providing enough force to support a sport utility vehicle on a postage stamp. Meanwhile, the centre is also home to a 26,000-square-foot sound chamber in which Emerson can develop and verify noise levels of new devices before a customer’s plant is built.
Located in Marshalltown, Iowa, home to Fisher, which was acquired by Emerson in 1992, the centre required almost 2 million pounds of process piping, more than 1,600 feet of 30-inch and 36-inch pipe, seven underground air storage tanks each more than 150 feet long, and more than 4,500 cubic yards of concrete.