Aluminium is a metal used in increasingly disparate applications due to its lightness, resistance and aesthetic properties.
It is subjected to various types of treatment according to the intended use, in order to make it more resistant to corrosion or to improve its mechanical characteristics.
A typical treatment of aluminium is anodisation, the purpose of which is to increase resistance to corrosion for use in aggressive environments and outdoors.
Industrial processes make large employ of a particular kind of pumps called liquid-ring pumps, a mechanical device allowing to obtain vacuum or significantly compressed-gas chambers.
These pumps offer high performances and efficiency, but using rotating mechanical parts they generate an amount of thermal energy, dissipated in the liquid-ring increasing the fluid’s temperature. In order to keep the pump working efficiently, the water employed in the liquid-ring pump to create the vacuum requires a proper temperature control.
Liquid cooling in a liquid-ring pump is achieved with heat exchangers, usually fed with cooling water.
Plate heat exchangers in this application allow to reduce assemblies sizes, achieving an excellent thermal efficiency, keeping the liquid-ring at the suitable temperature by using water at medium-low temperature, meaning that the cooling can be achieved by employing water provided by cooling towers or dry coolers.
A couple of topics must be addressed during the engineering of heat exchangers for liquid-ring pumps applications:
– low flow rate drops
– kind of industry of application
The first point is important to avoid pump’s overload, and the second one because of industries and processes with the presence of dirt, both in working fluids and environment. In this case, anti-clog heat exchangers must be preferred making easier cleaning and maintenance activities.
The word test benches, immediately recall in our mind images of high-performance engines, sports cars or supercars
There are test benches for many kind of applications, test benches for valves, for hydraulic systems, for thermal power plants … in each case several of these involve the need to dissipate heat, or very often to evaluate and adjust so much precisely the level of energy dissipated, because from this value you can define the equipment performance you are testing.
We have developed several applications related to these devices:
All of them designed and manufactured with detection and monitoring systems, to provide accurate feedback on the test that you are making. The levels of temperature under which we operate vary from -30 ° C up to + 300 ° C.
I wrote many times about contamination of the plate heat exchanger in my articles, probably because I’m particularly sensitive to this issue.
We often talk about energy efficiency, strong heat exchange and then I find exchangers completely clogged plates.
What influences the thermal performance of heat exchangers? difficult if not impossible to re-create models of a situation that has many variables.
Certainly we can say that the performance of the system on which the exchangers are installed, is affected in a way that can not go unnoticed.
What to do to prevent this?
few things, but important… especially the last one is an obvious signal.
Until a short time before all was well and at some point it all goes wrong, no one has tampered with or changed anything, something happened!!!
Doing the same things also means making the same mistakes, then change the way in which analyzed the data of your plant … or visit our service to have simple tips.
The complete regeneration of a plate heat exchanger has a cost that may appear important, how important is the amount of energy wasted induced by the same exchanger dirty and inefficient?
The technology of composite materials is in consistent and vigorous growth.
We can find structures in composite fibers from single frames for bicycles, and ending with the realization of entire race and high-performance super-cars, not to mention aviation.
To outline the peculiarities of these fibers on this blog is a futile exercise, on line are more specialized sources. Surely we can say that the perfect temperature control in production processes is crucial to getting the project characteristics.
We have developed customized special versions that apply to the switchboards of thermoregulation TREG series, we see cutting edge in this area.
It is in fact important to maintain and regulate the temperature within a well defined range, with very limited deviations, compensating for environmental variations and process very quickly, without for this to have significant deviations from the set point.
Lately we have made some particular heat exchangers.
This is an application in the chemical, for temperature control of small laboratory reactors. Usually for these applications we use plate heat exchangers…but in this case because of some special needs we design a special tube bundle solutions.
Indeed the customer had need to pass the process fluid inside the heat exchanger, which for corrosion resistance implications, must necessarily be made of titanium. At the same time due to chemical resistance we dont find suitable gaskets. The size of the heat exchanger are so small that an “all welded” would be extremely expensive, so we made small shell and tube titanium exchangers.
For the cooling section, it has moderately cold water, and wanting to achieve a similar temperature level in the reactor jacket, we have realized a heat exchanger with very particular tube bundle, which allows to obtain the required temperatures, despite the capacity in very small dimensions.
Choosing the right metals in engineering and construction of industrial machinery and equipments, is essential a proper evaluation of corrosion resistance of materials in contact with different fluids.
Here below is a corrosion resistance table based on results of general corrosion laboratory tests, involving materials and fluids to understand damages occurring due to unsuitable material selection in thermal machines, employed in thermal energy management and process industry, such as heat exchangers and thermoregulating units, as well as in general engineering equipments working with fluids, in sectors such as food and beverage, chemical, power generation and oil & gas facilities.
Different metals are here evaluated, such as Stainless steels, bronze and cast iron, for a wide range of elements, fluids and aggressive or potentially corrosive substances.
More datasheet and download data supporting installation and maintenance operations are available in the Resources section of our Tempco website.
From the pen of Fabrizio Gallelli, directly on the italian language site www.ingegneri.info, here’s an interesting article on the topic of Heat pumps, explaning how this kind of thermal machines work, achieving energy efficiency using a combination of a compressor, a condenser, an expansion valve and an evaporator.
The topic is mostly referred to civil and residential conditioning and HVAC, more than to chillers for industrial refrigeration. Anyway it helps in a clear way on the kinds of heat pumps existing, and working principles of this coolers/heaters.
Heat pumps provide heat from a cold source, ground, water or environment air, absorbing heat from the cold source employing electric power and transferring thermal energy to a heat sink. A heat pump can be three to four times more efficient than simple electrical resistance heaters.
The cycle can also be reversible obtaining residential conditioning and cooling during summer.
The most recent applications in the field of refrigeration, as well as a whole series of installations in industrial field, require efficient heat exchangers and especially that they are able to resist very high working pressures.
I speak for example of refrigeration systems that use as refrigerant R744, simply CO2, or of heat recovery systems with superheated water at 200 ° C.
The heat exchangers of the series TPLATE B – C, reach working pressure of 70 bars, 100 bars, 140 bars in the various embodiments and possible to operate at temperature levels so far reserved at more expensive and sophisticated process exchangers.
Compact size, excellent performance of heat transfer and low pressure drop are the three fundamental characteristics. The quality and durability of the C series is confirmed by tests carried out up to the burst test pressure of 650 bar and the test cycle of over 100,000 cycles.
The requirement coming from many machine manufacturers is to integrate the systems of temperature control, inside of their equipment.
Tempco always goes to the standard range of temperature control units, or with its structural and bodywork protection, the series BTB, which provides in practice the realization of the same control, skid adaptable to the needs of installation of the machine manufacturers.
we provided units in all these areas and many others by customizing the concept of the standard thermoregulating units.
These are solutions that are typically reserved for manufacturers who need a lot of repetitive units.
During the last year, the technical department of Tempco has worked intensively with the design office, in order to extend the benefits of these solutions also to manufacturers who have decidedly contained amounts of machinery, measured in units / year, all this thanks to a study to be able to make standard solutions more special.
