Cleaning severely fouled piping

The project

A food manufacturing company contacted Goodway Benelux with fouling issues involving their seed dryer, a machine equipped with a spiraling tube that winds around a large cylinder. As the pipe vibrates, it moves the seeds upward while drying them to the desired moisture level. When the system decreases in efficiency, the seeds will start drying too quickly, causing them to stick to the piping. This creates blockages that prevent the seeds from moving upward and results in a production loss.

The customer needed a solution to quickly restore the piping to operational standards without fully disassembling the installation. In the customers case, the process required flooding the pipe and pushing a projectile through it to scrape away all the built up fouling. This procedure took at least a full day, during which production was interrupted, resulting in the loss of valuable production time.

The challenge

Goodway Benelux offers dry pipe cleaning equipment, where specialized tools and brushes, either nylon or stainless steel, are used to remove dry deposits in piping between 0-900 millimeters. These tools work very well on crystalline deposits such as salts and milk powder, as well as harder fouling like rust, effectively restoring piping to a clean state. However, Goodway Benelux had not yet tested this solution on dried seeds, which form a particularly hard residue due to the combination of oil and heat.

The solution

Goodway Benelux visited the site during one of the customers’s mandatory stops, equipped with a testing kit containing various equipment and tools to find the best solution for the challenge. The Goodway Benelux product expert first reviewed the customer’s existing cleaning procedure to determine how and if Goodway® equipment could optimize their current cleaning process. Various brushes and tools were then tested to find the best solution. The testing revealed that a combination of nylon spider brushes paired with the air-powered AWT-100X tube cleaner provided the ideal solution, effectively removing nearly all fouling buildup from the piping.

After the test, the customer purchased a complete dry pipe cleaning package, which included a variety of nylon brushes ranging from 200–700 mm and a flexible shaft designed for dry use. Combined with on-site training, the customer is now able to perform the cleaning independently, giving them greater flexibility and significantly reducing reliance on external cleaning companies.

Summary

• Almost complete removal of built up fouling
• The customer achieved a significant reduction in maintenance downtime because disassembly of their piping was no longer required
• On-site product training and proces optimilization by Goodway Benelux