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Heat exchanger cleaning
18
Apr

How to Clean Heat Exchanger Tubes

This article introduces two main ways of how your heat exchanger tubes can be cleaned. Heat exchanger cleaning is essential to keep your processing equipment at the required temperature and working efficiently. Heat exchanger fouling is caused by fouling and scaling that settles in the tubes and algae that inevitably grows as a slimy substance on the pipe walls. This reduces the efficiency of the heat exchange process and also reduces water flow in the cooling system as fouled tubes have a higher pressure drop. Eventually the heat exchangers get clogged. Soft residue starts solidifying into a hard residue within a matter of hours. This process is referred to as scaling. Scaled residues need-intense cleaning to be removed. If the tubes would be brushed before scaling kicks in, they are kept clean without too much effort at all times. Imagine, us not brushing our teeth 3 times a day. For those of us who don’t, they have had the rather unpleasant experience at the dentist cleaning the scaling. It becomes clear that maintaining a clean system is critical for its healthy long-term functioning and high-frequency cleaning has the best results. The regular manual heat exchanger cleaning route This means turning off and disassembling your heat exchangers and cleaning them manually. Chemicals are used to dissolve and clean the residue or brushes possible in combination with high-pressure cleaning are applied to remove the hard residue that is stuck tightly to the walls of the heat exchanger. This works, the only downside is that it’s a constant requirement for operating systems and that the performance constantly deteriorates between service interruptions.Because there is nothing to reduce the formation of various debris and residue, the fouling layer accumulates linearly, causing heat transfer and efficiency problems. Every stop of operations to clean the heat exchangers is expensive unnecessary downtime. The automatic heat exchanger cleaning route To prevent scaling from happening it is possible to insert brushes in the heat exchanger tubes. With a reversing valve using water pressure to send the brushes up and down the tubes every few hours, we have a constant cleaning process. Just as brushing your teeth regularly.EqoBrushis designed to do just that. As result of this constant cleaning, debris does not have the time to accumulate and solidify. This means that your heat exchangers stay at optimal performance all of the time. The EqoBrush system typically has a pay-back time of less than one year, as it lets the heat exchangers work at full capacity constantly. The reductions of energy and water consumption on top of limited use and disposal of chemicals provide a great ecological incentive for companies looking to reduce their wastefulness.
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