How’d They Do That?!
Condenser Re-Tube
Ward performs work all over the country for many different business sectors. Most people think of Ward in the Chemical Processing Industry space, and that’s for good reason. We built our business over the last 42+ years by servicing CPI customers all across the US. Refining, Industrials and Utilities make up a good portion of the rest of our market.
This month’s segment of “How’d They Do That” is brought to you by one of our Utility customers. They had two component coolers for one of their power generating units that were original that were in need of a little more than preventative maintenance. One was in decent shape, although there were a good number of plugged tubes. The second unit had issues to say the least. And they wanted them repaired at the same time, in parallel.
These component coolers used nearby river water on the tube side to cool hot condensate. Tubes in this case were 90/10 Copper-Nickel and quite thin. Some tubes had ruptured, which let river water mix in with the hot condensate on the shell side of the unit. With river water comes sediment of all types: mud, gravel, shells, fish bones, bottle caps – you name it.
We suspected we might run into issues and we did. Many of the thin tubes snapped, some leaving remnants far out in the middle of the unit, many feet behind each tube sheet. This led to some creative tool-making, which was instrumental in removing some of the broken tubes that were buried. Several windows had to be cut in the shell to remove 100% of the broken tubes so the customer could have like-new units with 100% of the original tube count for efficient heat transfer.
The additional work called for an additional crew to be mobilized to help keep the project on schedule, but at the end of the project, the customer was very pleased to have two 100% efficient heat exchangers once again.
Editor’s note: Please discuss any plugging with your heat exchanger fabrication and maintenance vendor specialists – these units had some homemade plugs installed that created many issues and cost quite a bit of time to remove. There are specialty plugs that can make this type issue a thing of the past.
