Chemical Cleaning

What is chemical cleaning?
Chemical cleaning is a cost-effective and efficient method involving the use of reactive chemicals to remove unwanted deposits, corrosion, residual oils and greases, and other obtrusive contaminants from the surfaces of various pieces of process equipment, including components of power-generating units such as boiler and condensers, heat ex-changers in refineries and other industrial equipment. This process is used for passivization to eliminate fouling, oxidation, process system corrosion, and decontamination of process lines and vessels.

Chemical cleaning is conducted for many reasons:

• To eliminate scales that contribute to increased corrosion (example: iron oxides and copper found on the waterside of many type of process equipment).
• Increase heat transfer in condenser, exchanger, etc.
• To increase fluid flow rate and decrease pressure drops. The pressure drop of a fluid in a pipe at a constant flow rate is inversely proportional to the cube of the pipe diameter. Thus, small changes in pipe diameter may have a large effect on flow rate and pressure drop.
• To increase vacuum. (Utility plant: a clean condenser may have a vacuum that increases the boiler output that has to be regularly cleaned to increase the vacuum caused by condensing the steam.)
• To remove toxic (eg. benzene) or inflammable vapors (eg. hydrocarbon) prior to vessel entry.

How we can help
TuffChem offers a full line of chemical cleaning equipment and well-trained operators and chemists that guarantee the quality of our chemical cleaning results. We provide the required documented maintenance program for each re-circulation with written procedures for quality control so as to give our customers peace of mind.
Our chemical cleaning services are applicable to a wide array of industrial settings, which includes:

• Boilers
• Cooling System
• Heat Exchangers
• Condensers
• Tanks
• Passivation Processes – Picking Processes
• New Power Plant Installation Pre-cleaning
• Removsal of Iron Fouling from Packed Stripper Tower
• Process Piping and Systems Surface Preparation