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.

 

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