The Importance of Keeping your Heat Exchanger Clean

Heat exchanger air water cleaning is an absolute necessity in order to keep your production system running smoothly. If your heat exchanger is not kept as clean as it should be, it will not be able to function properly and the heat exchange process will not take place efficiently. This will lead to significant problems down the line if it is not dealt with as soon as possible. However, simple cleaning alone will not suffice to keep everything in tiptop shape.

An air-to-water heat exchanger is highly specialized equipment intended to be used when ambient or air temperatures are higher than 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Industrial air conditioners are unable to cool machinery when the ambient temperature is at that level, because the refrigerant their compressors produce is at around 150 degrees Fahrenheit, and there is too little difference between the two temperatures for the refrigerant to do its job. In cases such as these, air-to-water heat exchangers come into play. They bring the enclosure interior below the temperature of the ambient air so that the equipment can function properly.

At its most basic, heat exchanger air water cleaning is simply making certain that both the air and the water utilized to dissipate the heat from your process system are kept clean. If for instance the mechanism of your system that brings in the air is a cooling tower, you will have to realize that when it brings the air into your system, all the debris that happens to be in the air will enter the system along with it. This debris can then enter the system, build up within it, and restrict proper operation – and eventually cause a malfunction, perhaps even a serious one. So simply keeping your heat exchanger system clean would appear to be the solution to this problem.

However, critics have compared this to taking a cold tablet when one has a cold, and with good reason. While cleaning the heat-exchange system will ensure that it is free of anything that could cause problems, it does nothing whatsoever to prevent the problem from recurring, especially in areas where there is plenty of debris that could potentially cause some sort of jam. In that sense, simple cleaning will not be enough.

The ultimate solution, then, would be to install excellent filtration technology to keep the debris from entering the system in the first place, and combine this with diligent cleaning.

So ensure that you install the proper filters and filtration technology and religiously perform your heat exchanger air water cleaning operations to enable your entire system to function optimally.

By Sabrina Rocca