ACD is a member of Cryogenic Industries and manufactures two primary product lines: cryogenic pumps and turboexpanders. ACD say they are one of the major equipment suppliers within these lines. Since joining the Cryogenic Industries group of companies in 1983, ACD has instituted and maintained a stringent quality assurance program that is currently certified to ISO 9001:2000 standards. They use modern design tools like ProE, 3D modeling, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and Finite Element Analysis (FEA) when developing products, and say this dedication to design ensures ACD products meet process conditions and specifications. This is also achieved through extensive testing to verify product performance meets design specifications under cryogenic conditions.
Location
Located in Santa Ana, California, ACD is housed in a modern 50,000 square foot (4645 m2) facility filled with computer-controlled machining centres, sophisticated balancing equipment, clean rooms for oxygen cleaning of pumps and spare parts, and an extensive spare parts inventory. Additionally ACD recently upgraded its test pad with more liquid capacity, extra testing stations for pumps and turboexpanders, and up to date instrumentation to ensure cryogenically testing products becomes part of the standard work flow process.
Product range
ACD’s pump line is varied and includes a large range of centrifugal and reciprocating pumps primarily focused towards distribution applications (trailer loading/off-loading, liquid transfer, and high pressure cylinder/storage filling). They say in the future new R&D projects will focus the company’s efforts back into the process and plant applications where strong market growth continues. New products include the HD4 (high pressure / high flow reciprocating pump) used with liquid nitrogen for enhanced oil recovery and natural gas processing and the TC-34 (submerged) and AC-32 (sealless) pumps for transferring LNG, both from the LNG terminal and vehicle fuel stations. For traditional industrial gas cylinder / storage filling applications, the X9 Series combines design strength, modular configuration, and lower costs to benefit customers from operations to purchasing.
ACD’s turboexpander line includes a broad range of high efficiency machines that are used in air separation plants for gas separation and liquefaction. Their turboexpanders are designed for today’s pressures, temperatures, and process requirements and come in 6 standard frame sizes from TC-2000 to TC-12000 (nominal tip diameter of expander wheel in thousands of an inch, i.e., 12 inches). Each frame size is designed to overlap the adjacent frame sizes by 50 percent say designers, which should allow a near perfect match under most process conditions. The company explains that, $quot;With over 30 years of experience and close to 600 turboexpanders in the field, ACD is considered a major supplier with optimum performance and reliable service capabilities.$quot;
Customer base
The customer base for the industrial gas market is shrinking as consolidation continues. ACD plans to continue to focus on the 6 majors, Air Products, Air Liquide, Airgas, Linde, Nippon Sanso, and Praxair and their multiple locations around the world. However, the benefit of ACD’s structure is that they have the ability to not only focus on the key players and their key locations, but also cover the distribution market and the smaller players via their 12 sales and service locations in the United States (4), Canada (2), United Kingdom, Germany, Malaysia, Australia, China, and S. Korea; with multiple agents and distributors supporting some locations.
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