Projectile’s heat exchanger tube cleaning services utilize the same mechanical methods as our condenser tube cleaning services, but on a smaller scale. Our customers often require us to clean small heat exchanger bundles in conjunction with larger condenser tube cleaning jobs. Projectile technicians have extensive experience cleaning various smaller tube bundles such as oil lube coolers, exciters, feed water heaters, hydrogen coolers, stator coolers, and numerous others.
Projectile Tube Cleaning can also offer rotary heat exchanger tube cleaning services for certain heat exchangers. Some conditions that may call for rotary heat exchanger tube cleaning could be very small tube sizes or limited access to the heat exchanger which would make water propelled mechanical tube cleaning not possible.
Heat Exchanger Tube Cleaning and Heat Exchanger Repair
Projectile Tube Cleaning primarily offers its heat exchanger tube cleaning services onsite at our customers’ plants, but we can also offer a larger array of services at our manufacturing facility. At our facility we can provide traditional heat exchanger tube cleaning services as well as maintenance and testing services. Projectile Tube Cleaning can pick up tube bundles from a customer’s location and bring them to our facility. Our technicians can then dis assemble the heat exchanger and prepare a maintenance plan based on the customer’s needs. Various types of heat exchanger maintenance can be done on the tube bundles including, but not limited to:
- Shell side tube cleaning
- Shell cleaning
- Water box or end bell cleaning
- Cleaning inside the tubes with various methods: drilling out hard deposits, shooting projectiles, rotary cleaning with brushes
- Pressure testing the tubes for leakage pneumatically or hydro-statically
- Pressure testing the heat exchanger shell side pneumatically or hydro-statically
- Tube sheet repair
- Tube sleeving
- Retubing of heat exchanger bundles
- Tube sheet coating
- Water box or end bell coatings
- Tube plugging
- Inspection and reporting on overall conditions of the heat exchanger
Plate and Frame Heat Exchangers
Although Projectile Tube Cleaning primarily focuses on shell and tube heat exchanger cleaning, we can also provide heat exchanger cleaning services for plate and frame heat exchangers. Projectile Tube Cleaning’s preferred method for plate and frame heat exchanger cleaning involves circulating descaling chemicals to remove deposits. Chemical cleaning of plate and frame heat exchangers works by circulating a specialized descaling agent through the cooling side or water side of the heat exchanger. The chemical descaler is typically an inhibited acid that is matched to the deposit inside the heat exchanger. Because the acid portion is inhibited it is safe for the plates and gaskets of the heat exchanger. While the chemical solution flows through the channels of the plate and frame heat exchanger it dissolves the mineral scaling and other debris. Typically the whole process takes about eight to ten hours to fully dissolve the scale inside the heat exchanger.
In contrast to other cleaning methods of plate and frame heat exchangers, circulating chemical is superior for many reasons. The other leading method for cleaning plate and frame exchangers is to first disassemble the heat exchanger and remove the plates to be cleaned one by one. This process can be very expensive and time consuming. Each time a plate is removed from the frame of the exchanger and cleaned individually typically with pressurized water. The gaskets that are between the plates normally need to be replaced which also adds to the 
cost of the process. Circulating chemical through the exchanger simply involves hooking a pumping unit to the inlet and outlet connections of the exchanger and does not involve significant mechanical work beyond this. Because of the large amount of mechanical work involved with disassembling the heat exchanger for cleaning, chemical circulation is a much lower cost option and it generally provides the same cleanliness as cleaning the plates one at at time.
