The proper management of cooling tasks is a delicate and very important operation in the production of expanded polystyrene. In fact, this kind of application in the past used to be achieved employing cooling towers, but nowadays the evolution of technologies allows to accept cooling temperatures at higher levels.
This development therefore allows the use of air-cooled condensers, the classic dry-coolers, adopting a solution that also offers the advantage of eliminating the water consumption involved with evaporative towers and ensuring a much simpler overall maintenance of the plant. In fact, there is no longer the risk of legionella implications due a poor water management or scaling due to the presence of carbonates.
The cooling solutions for the production of expanded polystyrene developed by Tempco therefore use special heat exchangers equipped with stainless steel tubes, a material chosen with the aim of increasing their durability and reliability over time.
These are heat exchangers that are realized using a very particular production process, involving the realization of plates and related channels using a technology similar to the one that’s employed for the realization of printed circuits. In fact, employing a sort of electrochemical etching process, the channels on plates are obtained following a customized layout that was previously prepared on a PC using a CAD software, then transferred the plate with a sort of ‘printer’, just to make it simple.
Clearly, the process isn’t so simple and predictable, it requires indeed a special and very particular know-how, but it allows to realize plate heat exchangers with very interesting characteristics. Very interesting because it’s plain to see that to be able to realize a kind of channel using this process allows to have maximum flexibility and total design freedom in the realization of the channels. So that therefore we’re no more limited to a mould required in the traditional physical printing of the plates, but we are using a mechanical processing.
Furthermore, we don’t have to realize a mould anymore in order to print the plate, but simply enjoying the freedom to create a layout and transferring it onto the plate.
The advantages offered by these PCHE exchangers are remarkable, because they also allow to create multi-stream exchangers. In traditional exchangers, it is in fact possible to have three-stream circuits, at maximum. With this construction process we can obtain multi-stream heat exchangers, with 3, 4 o 5 different streams. In the most suitable position and with diversified channels and circuits, so that if we have to handle different flow rates, different pressure drops and kind of thermal transfers we can let loose in the creation of dedicated channels.
The construction of the exchangers is then achieved using a special welding process called Diffusion Bonding, that allows to obtain heat exchangers without filler materials, and so in case of stainless steel, full-inox exchangers but also full-titanium, completely made in titanium, offering high pressure and high temperature resistance. High temperatures in terms of extreme levels in both directions, from cryogenic temperatures up to very high temperatures.
And this clearly opens to applications in a lot of different industrial sectors.
Clearly, there are also some disadvantages, such as the costs and production times, but these are widely rewarded and repaied by the fact of having plate heat exchangers with such high performances.
Tempco participates on November 23 at mcT Hydrogen, conference and exhibition on industrial systems and solutions for hydrogen, organized by EOIM fiere, to be held in Milan at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in San Donato.
Hydrogen will have a key role in the future of decarbonization and sustainability for the energy transition, as a green and renewable alternative to fossil fuels. Tempco operates in the hydrogen industry providing solutions with heat exchangers for the cooling and temperature control in fuel cells and hydrogen technologies.
At mcT Hydrogen we will also be offering a dedicated speech on the topic ‘Evolution and peculiarities of thermal management systems for the production and use of hydrogen’.
Correct cooling of lubricating oil plays a key role in turbine generator applications intended for power generation. Efficiency and reliability, crucial requirements of these systems, largely depend on the thermal management of the lubricating oil. To ensure efficient cooling of lubricating oil in turbines used in power generation, Tempco provides advanced solutions with particular focus on double standby heat exchangers with interconnection valves.
The temperature of the lubricating oil is a fundamental parameter to ensure the correct functioning of turbines in power generation. High temperatures can compromise the viscosity of the oil, reducing its lubrication capacity and increasing component wear. On the other hand, temperatures that are too low can cause condensation and thus accelerate corrosion. Precise temperature control is therefore essential to ensure the life and efficiency of the system.
Tempco offers a wide range of coolers and custom cooling skid systems designed to meet the specific needs of turbines in the power generation sector. The double standby heat exchangers represent an innovative solution in this area: these systems allow the continuous passage of oil through the master exchanger, with a second exchanger if necessary, ensuring constant cooling and avoiding interruptions in power supply .
Interconnect valves are a key element in these Tempco dual systems. These valves regulate the oil flow between the exchangers, ensuring that the passage through the second exchanger occurs when necessary, quickly and effectively.
Operational Benefits:
• Improved reliability: advanced temperature management ensures stable and reliable operation of the turbines.
• Customization: Tempco solutions are custom designed, adapting to the specific needs of the customer.
• Minimal interruption: dual standby exchangers ensure continuous cooling, minimizing the risk of interruptions in energy production.
Solutions with dual standby exchangers for oil cooling in turbines in power generation represent a further advanced solution that demonstrates Tempco’s commitment to innovation and optimization of energy efficiency. Investing in these technologies not only improves operational performances, but also contributes to environmental sustainability in the power generation landscape.
This is an appointment we gladly renew, following the presence of Tempco in the last year’s edition of the Hydrogen Guide, highlighting the increasing interest and demand in the market for solutions using hydrogen as a renewable source and a sustainable green energy vector, as well as the commitment of Tempco in deploying innovative technologies enabling the diffusion of these solutions.
In the field of green technologies, especially important is the collaboration with our technological partner Microchannel Devices (µCD), that makes the story of the Tempco feature in the new Hydrogen Guide 2024, that designs and realizes PCHE exchangers using a special process called Diffusion Bonding. This is an innovative solid-state welding technique that allows to obtain heat exchangers’ plates stacks in a monolitich block, able to stand the high pressure and temperature levels involved in emerging hydrogen industry applications.
In case of plate heat exchangers that can be inspected, it’s clear that cleaning is easier, but relatively easy in fact. Let’s say that being made to be inspected, it is sufficient to dismantle and open the exchangers and wash them, using acids, cleansers and more or less aggressive fluids. And once they are cleaned, close them again.
But this is not enough. Because usually this intervention is also integrated with a dye penetrant testing, in order to ensure that plates are not broken, cracked or showing corrosion.
In fact, evident effects of corrosion can be eye catching, but there can be also micro crackings, maybe due to a bad maintenance, for example if the plates pack has been clamped too tight and plates have been crushed. This cannot be evident, and it can be checked out only using dye penetrants. A testing operation that is performed on the 100% of the plates.
Another operation that can be made, even if it’s not necessarily required, but sometimes it is, is to provide a substitution of gaskets.
Most of the times, the cleaning process involves the removal of gaskets, plates cleaning and re-mount of the gaskets, especially if these are clip-on gaskets, not glued. But there can be times when gaskets are worn out and so they must be replaced. In this case, the revamping involves also the substitution of the overall gaskets pack.
This is clearly a quite invasive operation, and also quite expensive that is worth to carry out on plate heat exchangers of a certain size. In case of very small plate heat exchangers, very often it cannot be worth the cost, and a complete substitution of the plates pack could be more cheap.
An interesting report by IDTechEx gives an update on the ongoing trend of liquid cooling solutions for data centers. Quite interesting is in particular the data reported by Nvidia related to its data center’s revenue during the second-quarter of 2023, which reached a record of USD 10,32 billion, up 141% from the previous year quarter and up 171% from a year ago.
The increasing demand for high-performance servers in data centers makes thus the environmental impact of these structures a growing problem. In this framework, Nvidia has announced in 2022 its new plan for reducing the energy consumption of data centers, crunching massive amounts of data or training AI models. The company has developed its new liquid-cooled compute card, reporting that it consumes 30% less power than the air-cooled version.
With the increasing thermal design power of chips, indeed traditional air-cooling struggles to meet cooling requirements. IDTechEx believes that by 2033, the yearly revenue of data center liquid cooling hardware will exceed USD 900 million, representing significant opportunities, as stated in the report ‘Thermal management for data centers 2023-2033’.
Tabella comparativa dei liquidi refrigeranti dei principali brand disponibili sul mercato per raffreddamento a liquido dei data center
Although direct-to-chip cooling (D2C, also known as direct liquid cooling, DLC) has been widely adopted, D2C cooling can only cool a limited number of major components, such as chipsets and GPUs, rather than the entire board. Immersion cooling of servers, on the contrary, offers a high and evenly distributed cooling. Considering the average immersion temperature range involved, as reported in the comparison table here above, Tempco thinks there are wide opportunities for free cooling in these applications, further increasing the energy saving benefits. It is therefore possible to supply thermal dissipation systems using dedicated dry coolers, both dry systems and adiabatic whenever the ambient air temperatures rise. Tempco can supply as well free cooling solutions in immersion cooling applications with TCOIL exchangers.
Finally, as IDTechEx reports, the process of submerging the servers into tanks can be cumbersome and require significant retrofitting of existing rack-based data centers. Also there are upfront costs, as IDtechEx estimates that an immersion cooling tank can cost around USD 4.000, plus the cost of coolant liquid per tank to be filled. But overall, despite the relatively high upfront costs, the total cost of ownership of immersion cooling in data centers can be highly beneficial thanks to the high amount of energy saving that it achieves.
How shell and tube heat exchangers get cleaned? The idea of this new post came from a comment on a video on our Tempco YouTube channel. Let’s start saying that there are several kind of shell and tube exchangers, but the two main typologies are U pipes bundle exchangers, where the pipes bundle can be extracted, and straight pipes shell and tube exchangers.
A cleanable straight pipes exchanger is usually employed letting the dirty fluid flow inside the pipes, whereas the clean fluid flows inside the shell. That’s because usually the shell cannot be disassembled and therefore only the tubes can be cleaned. This can be acheived both through a washing, or also by dismantling the two heads of the exchanger and cleaning the pipes by inserting pipe cleaners, thus making a mechanical cleaning of the inside surfaces of tubes.
This is in fact a very simple operation, but it is also true that it depends on the lenght of the shell and pipe exchanger because in case the shell and tube exchanger is very long, we need a contiguous space in order to insert the pipe cleaner and get the overall length of the pipe cleaned.
Clearly if the pipe is very long, it becomes difficult to achieve a proper cleaning of the middle section of the tube, but let’s say it’s something that can be done anyway, and quite simple as well.
In case of U bundle pipes exchangers, the part that can be cleaned is the shell. In fact the U pipes bundle gets extracted and it can be cleaned using a high pressure washer or brushes on the external surface of pipes. This is not really a simple operation, because it becomes difficult to get inside between the tubes of the bundle to achieve an accurate washing.
The internal part of tubes cannot be cleaned, instead, because the pipes have a U bending shape and it is impossible to reach that part of the pipe, that therefore cannot be cleaned. Clearly it’s also possible to make a chemical washing, using aggressive agents with chemical products and cleansing products to clean the inside of the tubes. But it’s an operation that cannot be done if the dirt has completely clogged already the inside of the pipes.
The automotive sector, and especially the field of super cars and racing cars, involves some interesting applications for TempcoTREG HCE thermoregulating units, employed for test benches of radiators. All of the greatest automotive racing car manufacturers use thermoregulating units for the simulation of the proper functioning and for performance testing of water and oil radiators installed in high performing racing cars.
Cooling the endothermic engines in racing cars is indeed a very crucial task in order to ensure maximum safety, while the damages caused by over heating are plain to see. This aspect is in fact even more thorny speaking of very high performance racing cars, for which in addition achieving savings in terms of weight becomes even more important. For example, it is enough to think about what happened during the last 24h in Le Mans, lest June, when the Ferrari 499P n. 50 had to prolong its pit stop in order to complete the substitution of the radiator that got damaged by a stone.
In order to ensure the reliability of cooling radiators performances on endothermic engines in automotive applications, it is then necessary to carry out long testing campaigns in special test benches similar to small wind tunnels, where components are tested upon mechanical and physical stress simulating the severe working conditions that components will be exposed to during the racing.
We have talked many times about heating systems using electrical resistors with power supply modulation in order to achieve significant energy savings. These are in fact the typical mono-fluid thermoregulating units for industrial processes, and in particular we are going back to a plant that Tempco has installed years ago for a customer, aimed at heating a fluid in preparation vessels, in a very short time lapse.
Having preparation vessels with very high volume capacity, the power required was high as well, we’re talking about 150 kW or electrical power for the initial heating phase in order to heat diathermic oil at the temperature or 250° C. But once the fluid is heated, the cycle must be maintained and the installed power is only partially employed, or even no more required.
We then suggested the customer to install the control panel of the electrical resistors with triode thyristors, and thus with modulating power, a kind of inverter, that allows to manage the resistor supplying power based on the actual real need.
After two years of functioning, we visited the customer and downloaded the data from the data logger installed on board of the thermoregulating unit. By speaking with him, we have noticed that the maximum power consumption was happening during the initial heating phases, after which the heating power required for the production process used to go down even at 25% of it.
The idea of the user for the additional new plants we will install next year has been to extend the initial heating time cycles, programming the start of the production plant in advance of a few hours in order to have a lower installed starting power capacity, and therefore drastically reduce the energy consumption.
