Plate heat exchanger descaling at wire production facility

The project

A German company active in the production of wire cables reached out to Goodway Benelux with a challenge. Their company was using gasketed plate heat exchangers (GPHE), with water on one side of the system and oil on the other. The customer needed to cool the oil within a specific temperature range to ensure optimal performance in their wire production process. Keeping the heat exchangers in optimal condition is an important part to ensure a smooth and consistent production process.

The challenge

Gasketed plate heat exchangers, or GPHEs, operate with two independent cooling loops. Each loop has warm and cold plates separated by gaskets to prevent the fluids from mixing. The water-side plates cool down and absorb heat from the warmer oil-side circuit. In this case, the customer was looking for a solution to two problems:

1. They needed a way to clean the water-side loop. The use of hard water had led to significant calcium buildup, creating an insulating layer on the plates and quickly reducing system efficiency.
2. The client required a secondary chemical pump system to clean the oil-side circuit with a different type of degreasing chemical.

The solution

Goodway Benelux provided two of their largest descaling pump systems, the GDS-100. These systems operate using the cleaning-in-place method, which requires minimal disassembly of the heat exchanger. In combination with Goodway®’s ScaleBreak-MP descaling solution, which effectively removes fouling such as scale, rust, and biofouling, this approach ensured maximum cleaning efficiency and minimal downtime for the customer’s wire production machinery.

Goodway Benelux also supplied custom couplings for each pump to ensure that one pump system was dedicated exclusively to cleaning the oil circuit and the other exclusively for the water circuit, preventing any possibility of cross-contamination. In addition, Goodway Benelux provided on-site training to educate operators on how to clean both systems effectively and independently.

Summary

• The customer achieved a significant reduction in maintenance downtime by switching to the cleaning-in-place method, instead of manually disassembling the plate heat exchangers
• Goodway® ScaleBreak-MP descaler was used to safely remove deposits, without damaging the equipment
• On-site product training and proces optimilization by Goodway Benelux