300 UNDERSTANDING PROCESS EQUIPMENT FOR OPERATORS AND ENGINEERS

Hydroblasting “U” Tube Bundles

I was once watching a contract maintenance worker hydroblast a “U” tube bundle that
I had asked to be cleaned. For such a bundle, there is no visual way to see if the return
bend has actually been cleared. One has to observe the water flow exiting from the return
side of the “U” tube.
In this instance, I noted that on 20%–30% of the tubes, only a small trickle of water
appeared from the return side. So, I asked the maintenance guy how he was going to clear
the plugged return bends of the “U” tube bundle.
“Mr. Lieberman, I got to use a special tool on plugged tubes to force water through
those bad tubes,” he explained. “The problem is the return bend.”
“Okay. But how do you remember which of the 500 tubes are plugged?”
“Yeah! I got a photographic memory. I just kinda’ remember which is plugged, so I can
clear them altogether later on.”
I guess there are two possibilities. Either that guy is a mental giant. Or, he had no inten-
tion of clearing the plugged tubes. This is a common problem. How does one inspect a “U”
tube bundle to verify that it has actually been completely cleaned? I would just, when
I worked in Texas City, blow air from an air hose through each tube, and see if the air would
blow out the end of the return tube. For my 6000 ID alky contactor bundles, this could take
an hour or more for each of the “U” tube bundles.

Acid Cleaning
I was the acid cleaning king of my alky unit in the 1970s. I would clean, on-stream,
the water tube side of one of 20 to 30 coolers every week.
• Step one was to attach a truck of 10% inhibited hydrochloric acid to the cooling
water inlet.
• Step two was to attach a source of 12%–15% caustic to the water outlet.
• Step three was to turn on the acid to achieve a pH of one to three at the cooling water
outlet.
• Step four was to turn on the NaOH at a rate sufficient to maintain a pH of the water
return to the plant’s cooling tower of 5½–7½ (preferably 6½).
Too high a pH would cause the plant’s cooling water circulation to turn brown and murky,
due to the precipitation of dissolved iron salts which fouled exchangers. Too low a pH,
would cause the plant’s cooling water circulation to become corrosive. Leaks would spring
out in the carbon steel cooling water piping return header.
Effective acid cleaning required 15–30 min or less. I used to back-flush the water side
before acid cleaning. In more recent times, I believe Citric Acid is used, but I have only
used HCl because I only had the phone number in Sugarland, Texas, of the company that
sold Amoco HCl.
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Shell Side Cleaning

Some heat exchangers have a fixed tube sheet configuration. The tube side inlet and the
tube side outlet are on opposite sides of the exchanger’s shell. This sort of exchanger
does not permit the tube bundle to be extracted for cleaning and should never be used
in fouling service on the shell side.
I have tried on several occasions to clean the shell side of a fixed tube sheet exchanger
by circulating a wide variety of solvents with limited success. Exchanger pressure drop
declined a bit, but heat transfer efficiency did not noticeably improve.
Even when a bundle can be extracted from its shell, it may still be largely immune to
cleaning if:
• Tube spacing is 100 or 15/1600
• Tube pitch is triangular
• Tube size is ¾00
• Bundle is large (i.e., 3600 –6000 plus ID)
There are no straight channels through such a bundle. At best, only the outer two or three
rows are cleanable. At the Amoco Refinery, such bundles were soaked for a week or two in
vats of aggressive chloride solvents, which did eventually, I assume, remove the interior
deposits.
To avoid these problems, I design new heat exchangers using:
• 100 tubes
• 1½ tube spacing
• Rotated square pitch
This configuration provides a ½00 straight passage between the rows of tubes in all direc-
tions. Of course, this also diminishes exchanger surface area by 30%–50% for a given shell
diameter. But, that’s the price we pay for the ability to clean the shell side.

Air Coolers
Having cleaned three forced draft air coolers myself, I have a pretty good feel for how best
to clean the exterior finned tubes to restore the cooling air flow. Washing from the top-
down is largely ineffective. This happens any time it rains. Anyway, most of the dirt is
between the fins on the lower two rows of fins. I suggest you proceed as follows:
• Step 1—Drop off the bottom protective screen, and with a broom, sweep the underside
of the fins.
• Step 2—Assuming the fan is driven by a 3-phase AC motor (240 V), reverse the polarity
of the leads, and the fan will run backwards and blow some of the dead moths and
willow seeds off of the finned tubes.
302 UNDERSTANDING PROCESS EQUIPMENT FOR OPERATORS AND ENGINEERS

• Step 3—Soak the fins in a detergent for a few hours. Next, secure a source of clean water
with a pressure of 30–40 psig at the fan elevation. Using a ½00 tube, jet the water from
a distance of 1200 –1800 , between the bottom row of tubes. Caution: most fins are
aluminum and are easily deformed.
I always electrically lockout the fan motor myself and keep the key. Also, I tie off the fan
blade with a rope. It requires at least 1 or 2 h to wash a single tube bundle. Note that clean-
ing the exterior of the tube bundle will not reduce the amp load on the fan motor. That
requires reducing the fan blade angle. Maximum is 23 degrees; minimum is 10 degrees.

Slug Washing Air Cooler Tubes

On an 80,000 BSD Delayed Coker in Los Angeles, I had to improve the performance of the
fractionator overhead condenser air coolers. There were 32 of these coolers arranged in
parallel. I decided to water wash the eight worst performing tube bundles. I could only
do one at a time (without stopping process flow to coolers being washed) due to the
limited ability to handle the effluent waste water from the washing. Also, I only had
1 day before I had to fly home. Each cooler would take an hour to wash, including making
hose connections. The trick was to select the tube bundles that were most fouled or
plugged on the tube side.
To identify these coolers, I checked for those that had the lowest process outlet
temperature, which was a possible indication of low flow. Of these, I then checked the
air outlet temperature. Those exchangers having both a low air outlet, plus a low process
outlet temperature, were the ones most badly fouled on the tube side and required slug
washing.
After each bundle was washed, both the air and process outlet temperatures increased,
due to the restoration of the process flow rate and heat duty.

Fired Heater Convective Tubes

I would use the same technique for cleaning the studded or finned convective tube bank,
if the tubes are accessible from the top of the radiant section. Depending on the fuel
being fired, most of these deposits may be vanadium salts from fuel oil, rather than soot.
Vanadium deposits can be quite thick (1/4 plus) and form a whitish, smooth deposit,
at least on bare tubes.
Unfortunately, only too often, the fins in the convective section have been oxidized
due to an after-burn situation. The fins will appear rusty and you can break them off with
your fingers. Hydroblasting off the rusty fins is the only option.

Coke Removal From the Inside of Radiant Tubes

The modern, correct way, to remove coke from the interior of radiant tubes is a combina-
tion of two methods:
 Chapter 37 • Cleaning Process Equipment 303

• Pigging
• Burning
“Pigging” is done by forcing a “Pig” through the furnace tube with high pressure water.
As I write these words, I am holding such a pig in my hands. It’s about 500 wide and 800 long.
It was intended to remove the coke from the inside of a furnace tube with an ID of 600 . It is
made of hard plastic type material with dozens of metal studs protruding from its surface
by ¼00 or so. When pigging a heater tube, progressively larger diameter pigs are used until
one just a little smaller than the actual tube ID is used.
I was recently working for a refinery in Detroit on a relatively new Delayed Coker. They
had just restreamed a heater after pigging. The heater performance (i.e., the coil pressure
drop) indicated that the coke removal had been incomplete. This is normal. Coke removal
from the inside of furnace tubes is almost never 100% from pigging alone.
I advised the plant operators to burn out the residual coke using the older “Steam-Air
Decoking Procedure.” A mixture of a few percent air dispersed in 150–500 psig steam is
injected into the furnace tubes, which have been heated to 1000–1200°F. The residual
coke inside the tubes will burn off. CO2 in the heater effluent is used as a guide to monitor
residual coke. When there is no CO2 in the heater effluent, all coke has been removed. I call
this step, “Proof Burning.”
My Detroit client could not follow my advice, because their new unit did not have an
environmental permit from the city of Detroit for the emissions resulting from the proof
burning step.

Spalling and Hydroblasting

In the 1930s through 1960s, furnace heater tubes were cleared of coke by removal of boxes
(called mule-ears) at the end of each pair of tubes. The tubes were then hydroblasted clear
of coke. Very few heaters still have this expensive feature, which has been replaced with
“U” bends, which are welded in place and are not removable.
Hydroblasting was replaced with spalling in the 1960s. Hot tubes were exposed to
varying steam flows and temperatures, which caused the coke to spall-off the tube inner
diameter due to the change with temperature of the tube ID. The steam would then blow
the coke out of the tube. A small amount of air was periodically added to the steam to burn
out any residual coke. Ninety percent plus of the coke was spalled out with only a few per-
cent burned. I have always considered this older method to be superior to modern pigging.

Cleaning Heater Tubes’ Exteriors

When firing gas, there are no deposits to clean on the outside tube surface. When burning
Industrial Fuel Oil (i.e., No. 6 oil or Bunker Fuel), a ¼00 whitish deposit will accumulate on
the tube OD. This deposit is a Eutectic Mixture of 90% plus vanadium and a few percent of
sodium. The vanadium by itself does not inhibit heat transfer to any appreciable extent
and does no harm. It just makes the tube glow and appear to be overheating.
304 UNDERSTANDING PROCESS EQUIPMENT FOR OPERATORS AND ENGINEERS

However, the presence of several percent of sodium forms a corrosive eutectic with
the vanadium. At about 1250°F, the mixture liquifies, runs very, very slowly down the tubes,
and causes exterior grooves to be cut into the tubes. When the heater is opened, these
deposits should be hydroblasted off of the tube’s exterior surfaces.

Compressor Rotor
I became an expert on cleaning 10,000 BHP multistage, centrifugal compressor, variable
speed rotors in 1987 in Laredo, Texas. The fouling material was a hard, dark gray deposit
consisting mainly of:
• Salts
• Drilling mud
• Pipeline corrosion products
These solids were slowly reducing my compressors’ capacity (Solar-Centar 10,000 hp gas
turbine-driven machines) by fouling of the rotor. From experience, I had learned that if
I waited too long, these deposits would break off the rotor. The rotor would become unbal-
anced and the machine would start to experience excessive vibrations. Then, my on-line
cleaning method, which depended on running the machine at a moderate rpm could not
be used.
My method was “Nut Blasting.” An 1800  3600 inspection door was removed and the
machine spun at about ¼–½ its normal rpm. Using a sugar scoop, I would then slowly
add coarse Pecan nut hulls to the inlet of the first compressor’s wheel. After a while
(20 min), I would switch to progressively finer nut hulls. This treatment, which would
require several hours, was highly effective, and fun. The trick was not to wait until the
deposits became too thick, broke off, and unbalanced the rotor’s wheels.

Summary
I have limited my description to process equipment cleaning to procedures I have actually
done myself or personally supervised. Until I have performed some procedure myself in
the field, I really do not understand or remember exactly what to do. But once I have per-
sonally participated in some activity, I remember it in detail for the rest of my life. It’s
like learning how to ride a bike. For that reason, I always try to do things like cleaning
process equipment with my own hands at least one time. I tried to indoctrinate the young
engineers working for me at the Good Hope Refinery with this philosophy, to which they
responded with enthusiasm.