The Tempco Service team provides technical support for component identification, compatibility verification, and the supply of appropriate spare parts. First, it is necessary to identify the exchanger model, which is the basis for any spare parts request.

The exchanger model can be found from:

• Identification plate attached to the exchanger
• Technical drawings or thermal calculation sheets
• Tempco supply documents

It is also helpful to provide:

• Number of plates installed
• Gasket type
• Year of supply or serial number

The two tables below therefore offer valuable support when requesting spare parts for heat transfer plates and gaskets.

Finally, some helpful further tips:

• Send clear photos of the plates and gaskets for quick identification.
• Indicate the process fluid and operating conditions.
• Tempco can provide plate reconditioning and regeneration with leak testing.
• Keeping a spare set of gaskets reduces system downtime.
• Observe recommended tightening torque values when reassembling.

L'articolo Tempco’s spare parts ordering guide for plate heat exchangers proviene da Tempco Blog.

Precise control of heating and cooling temperature ramps is crucial to achieve the chemical reactions between ingredients in pharmaceutical production recipes, essential for the efficacy and quality of the finished products and active ingredients.

This TCU specifically allows to reach a maximum operating temperature of 300°C, thanks to an installed heating power of 300 kW equipped with a water-cooled section. The system’s efficiency is ensured by modulating power control in the reactor’s temperature regulation, achieved thanks to SCR thyristors. The TCU is finally equipped with a remote expansion vessel with a capacity of 1,500 liters.

L'articolo Modulating power temperature control unit for a pharma reactor proviene da Tempco Blog.

Gas turbines are extremely sensitive to fluid conditions, in terms of temperature, fluid density, and thermal profile stability. In many industrial applications (power generation, oil and gas, LNG, hydrogen-ready plants), precise control of gas temperature is essential to improve efficiency, reduce operational instabilities, and protect the equipment during transient conditions. This is where the Gas Turbine Performance Heater is involved.

A Gas Turbine Performance Heater is essentially a heat exchanger designed for gas preheating (air, fuel gas, process gas), with a controlled ΔT, high reliability, and often undergoing high pressure and continuous service. Typical applications include fuel gas conditioning, intake air heating, and heat recovery systems from oil/hot water/waste heat recovery circuits.

Tempco proposes PCHE exchangers as particularly suited to this role, as they offer significant key advantages over traditional shell-and-tube solutions:

• Extremely compact
• Resistance to high pressures (tens/hundreds of bar)
• Perfect thermal stability even with rapid gradients
• Minimal fluid accumulation → safety + fast response
• Channel geometry optimizable upon the actual operating point

In performance-driven turbine applications, this makes the difference.

PCHE + Turbine: a smart technical marriage
As a performance heater, the PCHE allows:

• very precise control of the inlet gas temperature
• low pressure drops (if properly designed)
• easy integration into compact skids
• reliable operation even in:
  ◦ offshore environments
  ◦ frequent start/stop cycles
  ◦ severe conditions (H₂ blend, dry gases, LNG boil-off)

When the focus is performance + reliability, the PCHE is often the most engineered choice, not just the most compact.

A double advantage is therefore achieved when increased performance is achieved by implementing a heat recovery system, and this is where the application becomes very interesting, when the PCHE is served by:

• heat recovery circuits
• jacket water
• hot oil
• process waste heat

The result is an increase in the overall efficiency of the system, a reduction in auxiliary consumption, and improved operational control of the turbine.

Tempco therefore positions itself as a strategic technology partner for the development and implementation of this type of application, providing not only the technology but also support for the engineering, in defining the actual duty cycle and verifying turbine-side pressure drops – a highly critical issue – and then ensuring the integration of PCHEs into complete skids and technical dialogue with EPCs and turbine OEMs. The PCHE is not a standard component, but a solution tailored to the plant.

In conclusion, the use of PCHEs as Gas Turbine Performance Heaters represents a natural, highly innovative evolution of high-performance applications in the oil and gas sector, effectively addressing the needs for compactness, safety, and control. Representing a perfect example of applied thermal engineering as a special and customized, non-standard solution.

L'articolo PCHE as gas turbine performance heater in oil & gas applications proviene da Tempco Blog.

Tempco already has several applications of temperature control units designed to meet the specific thermoregulation needs of molding carbon fiber components. The unit pictured below is a temperature control unit we recently supplied to a company in the province of Bergamo, specializing in the production of custom carbon fiber components for high-performance vehicles as well as other applications.

Tempco’s TCUs have a wide range of applications in the automotive sector, supporting our clients in defining the design and engineering process using a DFM (Design for Manufacturing) approach, aimed at achieving an ideal balance and harmony on both fronts. Maximizing aesthetic appeal while simultaneously enhancing the mechanical and structural performance of the components.

L'articolo Thermoregulation for custom carbon fiber components proviene da Tempco Blog.

This is another important step towards the realization of Baglietto’s Bzero project, a true ‘promise made to the sea’ from the shipbuilder, aimed at implementing a green hydrogen production module on its yachts for zero-emission navigation. Using filtered and deionized seawater, Bzero will be able to produce hydrogen with a purity of grade 5.0 at a maximum pressure of 35 bar, using a system of AEM electrolyzers (for a total power of approximately 55 kW), powered mainly by energy from renewable sources.

Baglietto’s zero-emission yacht for sustainable navigation uses photovoltaics to power electrolyzers, which produce green hydrogen directly from seawater. These in turn power an onboard PEM fuel cell system, enabling navigation in full-electric or hybrid mode. The propulsion system is automatically selected by the yacht’s advanced navigation systems to ensure the best balance between performance and efficiency. The cooling systems provided by Tempco, one of the partners in this important project, play a key role in the entire process: precise, constant, and reliable temperature regulation of all the yacht’s power electronics.

Going more in depth, as detailed by Baglietto itself, the hydrogen produced is stored in solid state, at low pressure and ambient temperature, inside metal hydrides tanks (MH storage). The hydrogen storage and release process is managed by a thermal management system that heats the metal hydrides during discharge and cools them during recharging. The required thermal energy is recovered from the heat generated by a PEM fuel cell module, with a capacity of approximately 185 kW, which uses hydrogen as fuel to produce zero-emission and zero-noise electricity. The generated power is regulated via a DC/DC converter on a 700 V DC central bus, a solution already tested on Baglietto yachts equipped with hybrid technology. Connected in parallel to the fuel cell on the same bus is a set of lithium-ion batteries designed to absorb peaks and sudden variations in user energy demand.

The operations conducted on the prototype created in port are aimed at optimizing the technical aspects to obtain the necessary RINA certifications for hydrogen tank refueling operations and speeding up the procedure, while also ensuring the highest levels of process safety.

L'articolo A promise made to the sea, first hydrogen refueling in port proviene da Tempco Blog.

These activities are crucial for the future of sustainable mobility, essential for the development of more sustainable technologies for the future of the automotive industry. We therefore extend our sincere thanks to Giacomo Silvagni, PhD Assistant Professor at Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, responsible for these projects at the University Department, who provided us with detailed information on two of the ongoing research projects.

The first image, in the scheme below, shows the construction of a flow bench for experimental diesel and gasoline common rail GDI (Gasoline Direct Injection) injectors, aimed at hydraulic characterization of the injection system and the development of control-oriented models.

As Giacomo Silvagni explains, high-pressure injection systems are typically used in control strategies with multiple, closely spaced injections. These strategies generate dynamic pressure wave effects and electromagnetic interactions that induce deviations from the normal injector operation, causing imbalances in the torque delivered by the engine from cylinder to cylinder, resulting in reduced efficiency and increased pollutant emissions. Thanks to the flow bench, built within the laboratories of the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Bologna, it was possible to carry out ad hoc experimental campaigns to experimentally characterize the tested injection systems, both diesel (up to 1,800 bar) and gasoline (up to 700 bar), and to develop control-oriented physical models aimed at real-time compensation of these dynamic phenomena compatible with standard engine control units.

For this first application, the Tempco temperature control unit was a central component of the test system, used to regulate the fuel temperature within the injection systems. The TCU therefore allowed for precise control of the fluid temperature, which is crucial for ensuring the repeatability of the experimental tests, and simultaneously verified the impact of different fuel temperatures on the system’s hydraulic dynamics.

The other two images below relate to the study for converting a 1.3-liter multijet diesel engine to operate on compression-ignition gasoline, aimed at studying high-efficiency combustion modes.

The study of innovative, high-efficiency, low-emission combustion methods is part of the ongoing development of internal combustion engines for high-efficiency, low-emission applications. Innovative combustion methods still represent one of the most promising solutions, especially considering the advent of synthetic and sustainable fuels. To verify the benefits of these technologies, a small 1.3-liter multijet internal combustion engine, originally designed for diesel compression ignition, was converted to GCI (Gasoline Compression Ignition) operation in the laboratories of the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Bologna. This activity allowed to verify the benefits of this combustion method, both in terms of efficiency and pollutant emissions, compared to traditional diesel operation. The entire engine operating range was replicated while maintaining all internal engine components in their stock production configuration, thus verifying their full applicability to off-the-shelf hardware already on the market.

The Tempco temperature control unit, as Silvagni further explains, was a central element of the test system as it was used to regulate the temperature of the air drawn into the engine during start-up. Thanks to the Tempco temperature control unit and the use of a dedicated air-oil heat exchanger, it was possible to increase the temperature of the air drawn into the engine before it entered the combustion chamber, thus promoting spontaneous ignition of the gasoline. The precise control achieved by the Tempco system also allowed to verify the impact of different combustion air temperatures on combustion stability and engine performance in terms of torque/power output and pollutant emissions.

L'articolo Temperature control units in high-efficiency combustion engine test benches proviene da Tempco Blog.

Also for pharmaceutical applications, we recently supplied three TREG temperature control units for silicone fluids in glass-lined reactors. This is a classic mono-fluid temperature control application, equipped with heating via electric resistors and a low-temperature cooling section (-30°C) using brazed plate heat exchangers and mixing valves.

Temperature ramps control is achieved through dedicated electronic thermoregulators and thyristors (SCR), which allow the customer to drive the heating elements with modulating power. Finally, the thermal control units work with special pumps, featuring magnetic drive technology and a very wide temperature range of -30/+300° C.

L'articolo Temperature control units for reactors at -30° C in the pharma industry proviene da Tempco Blog.

Mostra fiera idrogeno is a vertical event, now in its sixth year, organized by EIOM Fiere and dedicated to the wide range of the most innovative industrial technologies and solutions for the hydrogen supply chain.

You can pre-register for the event on this page.

Tempco’s PCHE exchangers represent an innovative technology that offers high performance to meet the critical requirements of hydrogen applications, such as extreme pressures and variable temperatures. The construction by diffusion bonding, or solid-state welding, of the plate pack allows these exchangers to operate at pressures up to 900 bar and beyond, thanks to their high structural integrity, which ensures operational reliability and high safety.

The photo-etching technique empployed for the plates allows to create customized layouts of heat transfer microcircuits, allowing PCHEs to be built in multistream mode, as required by the multistage compressors used in hydrogen refueling stations. This ensures extremely high heat transfer efficiency, rapid refueling, and installation in small spaces thanks to the exchanger’s highly compact design.

mcT Hydrogen is held concurrently with several other events, including mcT Oil & Gas and Security, a sector in which Tempco PCHE exchangers find equally important and interesting applications, such as pre-heaters in high-performance turbines and on GLN extraction platforms for gas cooling.

L'articolo Tempco’s PCHE exchangers at the mcT Hydrogen on April 14 proviene da Tempco Blog.

Brazed plate heat exchangers are the ideal solution for these plants thanks to their compactness, high thermal efficiency, and total maintenance-free operation. Compared to traditional shell-and-tube heat exchangers, they offer a series of concrete advantages that make them particularly suitable for modular, high-power density installations in small spaces.

The choice of Tempco
In Tempco hydraulic power plants, brazed plate heat exchangers are custom-sized based on the customer’s operating conditions:

• flow rates
• viscosity
• operating temperature
• heat dissipation duty

The use of copper or nickel-brazed stainless steel heat exchangers ensures high corrosion resistance and long operating life, with consistent thermal performance over time. Their compactness and reliability make them the perfect choice for high-performance systems, where every detail counts to ensure operational continuity and energy savings.

In short, brazed plate heat exchangers maximize thermal transfer efficiency and reduce overall dimensions, simplifying maintenance and improving the reliability of hydraulic power plants.

L'articolo Brazed plate heat exchangers in hydraulic power plants proviene da Tempco Blog.

CRN (Canadian Registration Number) number is a unique code issued by Canadian provincial/territorial authorities, required for the installation and use of pressure equipment, such as boilers, heat exchangers, pressure vessels, and fittings (fittings, valves, piping) in Canada. CRN certification is mandatory for equipment operating at pressures above 15 psig (approximately 1 bar) and, in the case of Tempco, ensures that the design and engineering of our brazed heat exchangers comply with Canadian safety standards.

A key safety requirement for importing and installing pressure-bearing components in Canada, this new certification, combined with the ASME certification, ensures that Tempco brazed plate heat exchangers comply with Canadian industry standards. Specifically, the CRN code is valid for installation of our brazed plate exchangers in the provinces of Ontario (ON), Quebec (QC), British Columbia (BC), Alberta (AB), and Saskatchewan (SK).

This new certification for installations in the Canadian market adds to the certifications Tempco has achieved over the years for its thermal control and industrial thermoregulation solutions such as ATEX for operation in potentially explosive atmospheres, such as in the chemical, petrochemical, and pharmaceutical sectors, and the ones for our TREG thermoregulation TCU units, which are UL certified for the North American market and EAC certified for Russia and the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) countries.

L'articolo Brazed plate exchangers with ASME certification and CRN code for Canada proviene da Tempco Blog.