On December 18, 2017 Air Water Plant Engineering (AWP) established a new large-scale canning plant in its Sakai Works to integrate the production of ASU, storage tank and tank truck.

The new plant was constructed on an unused land inside the Sakai Works which is one of Air Water’s R&D bases for the production of equipment and machinery.

The building is as tall as 20m at the highest part making possible the erection of even lengthy objects like distillation column. By the integration of separated production bases in Harima (Kakogawa) and Sakai, the company will be able to double the production capacity, resulting in the enhancement of production and cost reduction.

It took actually seven months or so for completion after the start of construction in last April. The inside of the building is separated into four blocks, consisting of the cold box manufacturing area to enable a simultaneous production of maximum three columns of VSU, the storage tank and tank truck manufacturing area, the machinery producing area for pump or quick-snow and the pipe/unit production area for mobile hydrogen stations. Apart from the equipment transferred from the former Harima Plant, a bending roller for the bending process for the large-type (30 tons) crane or plate has been newly constructed bringing an environment to enable an internal processing.

Air Water is planning on the in-house production of gas supply equipment like ASU and storage tank, and focuses on the enhancement to accumulate technologies and upgrading of production efficiency.

In July 2017, before completion of the new plant, Air Water made spinning off of Air Water Manufacturing (AWM) to separate AWP’s functions into engineering and manufacturing.
Kiyoshi Shirai president of Air Water commented, “Spinning-off is intended to minimize the production cost. We would like to first visualize the costs and set up a system to enable creation of competitive things easily.”

President Matsubayashi of AWP spoke of his aspiration saying, “In addition to the industrial gas-related equipment like ASU or storage tank, in the growing field of LNG-related equipment we made a tie-up with Sapporo Works which manufactures similar equipment for the new plant. We wish to raise the present sales scale of 18.1 billion up to 25 billion in 2020.”