How to deal with heater scaling
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After the heater became severely clogged by calcium and magnesium scale, it couldn’t be cleared using nitric acid – are there any other methods?
Mechanical methods can be used, such as brushing with a steel brush or shoveling, followed by rinsing with a high-pressure water gun, and finally pickling with 5% nitric acid.
Search for Grei Cleaning Company online to have the cleaning done, and note down their equipment and chemicals. Well done – once you’ve purchased them, you can carry out the cleaning by yourself.
Use chemical cleaning; hire a professional company to handle it. Spend a bit more money to ensure peace of mind.
I wonder what kind of heater the original poster is talking about? If it’s a tube-type structure, the end caps on both sides can be removed; a steel bar of appropriate diameter can be used, made pointed at one end, to create a passage, after which it can be cleaned with sulfuric acid.
It’s a tubular heater; we tried all the methods mentioned by the original poster, but we couldn’t even drill through it with a drill
It is possible to use an air drill for this purpose. Our previous fixed-bed reactors were of the same type as shell-and-tube heat exchangers, with catalysts filled inside the tubes; once the catalysts coked up and became very hard, an air drill was used to remove them, and it took three days to achieve success. Normal operation does not cause any damage to the tubes.
1. In the case of pipe sections, by removing the upper and lower end caps (or the left and right ones), a three-cylinder piston-type high-pressure cleaner with a pressure of around 50 Mp can be used to clean them with high-pressure water; this method yields immediate results, requiring little time and being highly efficient. 2. If it is in the shell side, a circulation pump can be connected to the inlet and outlet pipes on the shell side, along with a circulation tank of sufficient capacity and steam pipes. First, a liquid alkali of certain concentration is added to the circulation tank; the alkali solution is used for circulation and boiling for a period of time, after which it is drained. Then dilute nitric acid is added, and the solution is used for acid cleaning for a while, followed by the addition of a corrosion inhibitor of certain concentration. Finally, the area is rinsed with light water to check the cleaning effect. If it is clean enough, passivation treatment is carried out before the system can be put into use!
Rinsing with a high-pressure water gun of 500-800 kgf.
Our company has used high-pressure water guns for cleaning, with a water pressure of 30.0 MPa required