Heat Exchanger Maintenance
Heat exchanger maintenance is something that every production facility operators should worry about. The equipment in a sub-optimal state increases costs and increases wear-and-tear over time eventually shortening the life span. Read how to remedy this issue…
To maintain a steady and consistent output, it is critical to make sure that every system is performing up to its design conditions for which cleaning and maintenance should be done on a regular basis.
This is especially important in the heat exchangers of the water-based cooling system. The system requires a constant flow of water to keep itself cool, and the impact of any interference in the water flow or below par heat exchange performance may mean that process heat cannot be dissipated.
Various ways of heat exchanger maintenance
The traditional way of cleaning heat exchangers is through disassembling the shell and cleaning the tubes manually with chemicals and/or brushes. However, there are more investment, time and environment friendly ways available to keep the equipment clean.
The Eqobrush system is designed to clean the heat exchanger tubes during operation, a form of constant maintenance. With it, the need for regular service interruptions disappears, and the system can function at full capacity constantly.
As this automatic brush system can work maintaining the heat exchangers’ tubes automatically there is no drop in performance.
The brushes are powered by the water flow and pressure that is occurring in the system via the system pump. The Eqobrush reversing valve reverses the water flow over the heat exchanger for a short while every few hours and the brushes travel back and forth through the tubes, cleaning the system with all deposits being back-flushed into the cooling tower basin.
Reduced Ecological Impact
The reduced ecological impact of automatic tube cleaning should also be considered. Eqobrush equipped systems allow:
- Extension of equipment life time (less corrosion in tubes)
- Downsizing of equipment foot print (no overdesign)
- Reduction of carbon footprint as result of reduced consumption of electricity or fossil fuels
- Reduction of water consumption (higher Cycle of Concentration in cooling water allowable)
- Reduction of Chemicals required for manual cleaning
The payback period of this type of heat exchanger maintenance is below 1 year on average. That makes Eqobrush system not only efficient in maintaining your cooling tower systems performance, it also helps saving money by prolonging the time period between service interruptions of your factory.
