STERLING ? A central Kansas company is playing a small part in building the One World Trade Center in New York.

United Industries Inc. is helping with the building’s cooling.

The Freedom Tower is to be built where the World Trade Center once stood. The completion date is set for 2013.

United Industries says it constructed 17 condenser water filtration systems that will go on the building’s 104th floor and in its mechanical mezzanine.

Last month, the company shipped the last six of the filter systems, said David Nash, vice president of the company’s Tower-Flo Division.

The tanks will each be able to filter 475 gallons of cooling water per minute.

“They’ll be stored in a warehouse,” Nash said. “They’ll not be hauled into the job site until they are onto the 104th floor.”

The cooling towers will cool by spraying finely misted water into a column of moving air to transfer heat from the air.

The water captures minute particles of dirt and debris, which must be removed for the cooling to remain efficient.

United Industries’ Tower-Flo system does this by forcing the water through sand.

“In a large building like this there is a significant heat load,” Nash said. “When you add all the people and computers and electronic gizmos, there’s a lot of heat accumulating you want to get rid of.”

United Industries was founded in 1954 and relocated from Wichita to Sterling in 1995, Nash said.

The plant currently employs 15 people, manufacturing filter systems for industrial and recreational water systems.

The Freedom Tower sale is the company’s largest single order for Tower-Flo filters.

The previous largest order was a nine-vessel, 7,000 gallon-per-minute filter system exported to a power plant in Chai Hui, Taiwan, in 2003.

Nash said he hopes publicity and the company’s reputation from the World Trade Center will result in more work.

“It certainly gives us an inside track if they build a second tower,” Nash said.