Less than a year after construction started, the expanded Alfa Laval Inc. plant in Henrico County is up and running.

The $10 million expansion of the company's plant in International Business Park brings 100 jobs to the Richmond area. It will push Alfa Laval's local work force to 320, four times its employment when the company opened the manufacturing site in 1990.

"We have had only good experiences here in Richmond," said Sigge Haraldsson, president and chief executive officer of Alfa Laval AB. The parent company of Alfa Laval Inc. is based in Lund, Sweden.

Haraldsson and other executives on the company's global management team traveled from Sweden to celebrate the official opening of the plant addition yesterday. About 200 people attended, including Alfa Laval employees, business partners and local officials.

The plant manufactures heat exchangers for industrial and sanitary applications. With the nearly 90,000-square-foot expansion, employees will also manufacture pumps and valves used for sanitary fluid handling in the food, dairy and pharmaceutical industries.

The expansion is the largest corporate investment of its kind in Henrico this year, said Frederick T. Agostino, executive director of the county's Economic Development Authority.

It is also Alfa Laval's largest investment in any of its global operations this year, company executives said.

Although a slowdown in the U.S. and world economy has hurt business, Haraldsson said the company is seeing signs of improvement ahead.

"The global economy is very difficult to predict," according to Haraldsson. "The feeling we have now is that it is not slowing down anymore, that it has flattened out."

Alfa Laval closed an older pump and valve plant in Kenosha, Wis., and moved the operations here. The company also relocated its U.S. headquarters to an office in Glen Allen. It has service centers in Ashland and Chesapeake. Kirk Spitzer, a Virginia native, is president of the U.S. operations.

The Henrico plant makes pumps and valves under the Alfa Laval and Tri-Clover brand names. The addition has been operational for several weeks now, said plant manager Bob Dumke. About 23 employees moved from Kenosha, and the rest have been hired locally. "We will be hiring over time as we ramp up this factory," Dumke said.

The company was founded in 1883 by Gustav de Laval, who invented a mechanical skimmer that eliminated the task of hand skimming milk for farmers.