Heat Exchanger Cleaning

You have a plate and frame heat exchanger in your plant. The heat exchanger have been in operation for perhaps one year already. By this time, the efficiency have dropped. The heat exchanger cannot provide you the desired output temperature when they heat exchange.

How do you know this? You can know by seing the output temperature of both fluid ie the cold fuild and the hot fluid. If the output cold fluid temperature has increased and the output hot fluid temperature has decreased, then this are the sign of some sort of inefficient heat exchange situation. Why is this happening?

You can also check the pressure of the input hot or cold fluid, ie if the pressure increased, it is a sign of something called "fauling" which resulted in the heat exchange becoming inefficient. Yes, fauling is one thing that most of the time caused the heat exchanger to be not working optimumly.

All of these are just part of what you can notice and experience on your plate and frame heat exchanger. When this happen, you might want to consider removed the fauling from the plates.
But how? You have to options. You can either dismantle all the plate and frame heat exchanger OR you do the chemical cleaning. Well, i can say the decision must be correct. You must decide which method to chose. Because both will have direct impact on your production and/or operation and/or maintenance cost. So, you don't want to be caught making a bad decision by your superior!!! Ok. Let's continue in the next post....got more to tell....