The word ‘impossible’ is not in his lexicon

Mr. K. Kalyan Sundaram, Managing Director, Indaid Engineers Pvt. Ltd

Mr. Kalyan Sundaram, the Managing Director of Indaid Engineers Pvt. Ltd., is an entrepreneur of the first generation. A Mechanical Engineer (BE) from the Govt. College of Technology, Coimbatore, 1969 batch, Mr. Kalyan started his career with Killick Nixon in the Furnace Division. In 1973 he switched to the Eutectic Division of L & T where he spent his time in application engineering. The work turned out to be monotonous for the young engineer who always dreamt of doing something new and different.

“L & T is a large organization and I was like a drop in the ocean there,” exclaims he. The urge to take up challenges and prove to be different, compelled him to look for a suitable opening elsewhere. Soon he landed up in Wesman Engineering where he worked for four years until 1984. He was exposed to combustion technology and furnace engineering. However the job was more of a manager. It gave very little scope for him to take risks or apply his technical skills or engineering knowledge. It is this assignment that opened up new vistas in choosing a business line that gave him inner satisfaction.

Sound footing
Mr. Kalyan realized that though there were a handful of furnace manufacturers in Southern India, none was capable of designing fuel fired furnaces flawlessly, be it in terms of the right flame configuration or proper oil temperature, pressure etc. He found a business opportunity in these shortcomings. This is what culminated into the birth of Indaid Engineers Pvt. Ltd. The company was promoted in 1984 by Mr. Kalyan and his colleagues with a combined industry experience of over 50 years.

Today Indaid is an ISO-9001-2008 certified company with over there decades’ experience in executing turnkey contracts in the fields of furnaces, ovens, kilns, hot air generators, driers, waste heat recovery systems and other thermal engineering applications. It is a formidable name in fuel fired and electrically heated furnaces. It undertakes design, manufacture, erection and commissioning of large fuel fired and electrically heated furnaces for heat treatment, reheating, non-ferrous melting, etc.

It has built some of the largest Bogie type heat treatment furnaces of capacities upto 150 Tons and reheating furnaces for the forging industry of capacities up to 70T. It has built box furnaces of capacities up to 60 T. All these are installed with Recuperators for waste heat recovery and air preheat temperatures up to 450 deg C. It has built walking beam furnaces, pusher furnaces and conveyorised furnaces for heat treatment applications with capacities up to 10 T/hr. It has also made bogie / box furnaces for heat treatment with integral quenching facility using a mobile fork arrangement.

Indaid is well-known for making large ovens for core baking for foundries. These ovens are either continuous or batch type. Mesh belt type conveyorised driers have been designed and built for applications involving curing and drying. These equipment use a hot air generator. Tunnel type ovens with heating arrangement have been built for curing of Depressed centre grinding wheels. It has also built several driers and curing ovens for refractory bricks and precast refractory products.

Indaid is well versed in building large kilns for firing refractory materials. The application temperatures vary from 1000 deg C to 1620 deg C, using LPG or light oils as fuel. The kilns could be based on down draft principle, car type or top hat type. All these equipment harness the latest technology for energy efficiency and are operated using PLC controls and SCADA software.

A 40 ton box furnace supplied to a forging company near chennai

Energy Saving Initiatives
In order to help the customer save energy, Indaid builds Recuperators for waste heat recovery as a replacement or retrofit for existing fuel fired installations. It has supplied a number of large recuperators to steel and aluminium plants. These devices are tailor-made to suit specific applications and are carefully engineered and manufactured from suitable alloy steel materials to withstand high temperature and corrosive service conditions. Besides, Indaid also makes Hot air generators, Ladle pre-heaters and Infrared heated systems as standalone equipment.

Indaid was the first to manufacture a furnace to meet API-6A, App.H with a temperature accuracy of +/-12 deg C at a temperature of 1000 deg. C and +/- 8 deg.C at 650 deg C. Since then there has been no looking back. Among the major orders executed include Oil fired heat treatment furnaces of 30 T capacity in dimensions 5300 mm L x 5300 mm W x 1800 mm H operating at 1300 deg. C supplied to a forge shop in Ghaziabad. Similarly, for Bayforge, the company has supplied oil and LPG fired bogie hearth forging and Heat treatment furnaces of capacities 40T, 60T and 70T.

At Indaid, every furnace is tailor-made. It uses up-to-date technology, incorporating the best of combustion equipment and controls. “We are the first to use pressure control loops in fuel fired furnaces to achieve very good temperature accuracy while saving the fuel. And we developed our own recuperators which preheat air supplied by blowers to 300-450 deg C, saving enormous energy,” reveals Mr. Kalyan. Indaid is indeed a leader in furnace technology, making over a hundred types of furnaces for a plethora of applications including high temperature radiation heating.

Indaid has an impressive list of customers who include: BASF, BHEL, CHW, Bayforge, Murugappa Group, TVS Group, Wheels India, Axles India, Alstom, Vesuvius, Hinduja Foundry, etc. It is now offering furnaces to customers conforming to AMS-2750 E and VSSC which are stringent standards for temperature uniformity inside the furnace with an accuracy of ± 3 deg C.

“The Muragappa Group is an all-time reference for us since we have done relentless R & D to develop a continuous tunnel oven of 21 metres length for baking the DC wheels in which colour match and consistency are critical. Subsequently, the Group has installed such ovens from us in all its plants in Chennai, Hosur and Uttaranchal.”

The furnace it has supplied to Kuwait Pipe Industries & Oil Services Company, Kuwait needs special mention. It is of the size of 6m x 6m x 24 m depth and has 52 burners at the top and bottom at the side walls. The furnace is used for plate heating, stress relieving, normalizing, etc. The temperature attainable is 1000 deg C max. The furnace is giving excellent performance for the past 7-8 years.

Recently the company has started manufacturing Vacuum furnaces for treating tool & die steels. These cause no pollution unlike salt bath furnaces. It has supplied eight vacuum furnaces so far. Among its customers are large corporates like Hindalco and Jindal besides a number of jobbing heat treaters.

Indaid furnaces are robust equipment. They seldom require any servicing. “The installation, erection & commissioning of each furnace is a lengthy process, talking almost three months. We also train the engineers on operation and maintenance of the furnaces. Nevertheless, we give one year warranty,” states Mr. Kalyan.

The Indaid furnaces supplied some 20 years ago are said to be still going stronger. The Bogie Hearth oil fired furnace supplied to Samco Metals & Alloys is a classic example. The furnace supplied to Canara Steels, Mangalore is still older, says the company.

A continuous oven supplied to Carborundum Universal – A Murugappa Group company

Attributes to Success
According to Mr. Kalyan Sundaram, a furnace builder is like a house builder. “Once we use the right design, select raw materials and components like combustion equipment, controls, refractories, etc, the furnace would last for a life a time.” Talking about his commitment to quality and customer satisfaction, he underlines: “At Indaid we would rather lose a contract than an existing customer.”

Dwelling on the factors attributing to the success of his company, Mr. Kalyan says: “Once we go to the customer site, we never run away. We accomplish the job to the customer’s satisfaction and then come out. This is very important. To our knowledge, some of our competitors seldom collect the last 10% of the contract value which is released after successful commissioning and start up of the furnace, fulfilling the requirements committed!”

Describing his people as the core strength, Mr. Kalyan says, his focus is on developing his human resources. We hone our people and train them so that they can perform their functions eminently. We do not believe in USING people.” Narrating some of the happiest moments in his professional life, Mr. Kalyan says, he gets the greatest satisfaction when he addresses the participants in training sessions or seminars. “I also have the same feeling when some of our customers give us red carpet treatment when I visit them on a courtesy call. The fact remains that we are indebted to them.”

When asked about his efforts to maintain the leadership position, Mr. Kalyan ruminates thus: “We constantly endeavour to upgrade our technology through interaction with overseas companies in the same domain. We make it a point to attend the International Exhibition like THERMPROCESS at GIFA held at Dusseldorf every four years to keep ourselves abreast of the lasts developments in thermal engineering. We are careful not to make a promise which we cannot fulfill.”

Mr. Kalyan envisions remaining a leader in thermal engineering. “Currently our focus is on ‘Vacuum & Seal Quench Furnaces’ which has a great potential because of its technological advantages and eco-friendliness,” he adds. Indaid has been awarded Industry Excellence Award 2013 by the Chennai Chapter of ASM International. Indeed, when it comes to spearheading innovations in thermal engineering, the word impossible is not there in Mr. Kalyan Sundaram’s lexicon.

– P. K. Balasubramanian.