News

Shot blasting can be a very efficient alternative to some other cleaning methods.

During a summer stop a turbine was stripped and inspected, the findings that the critical parts were contaminated with scales that can jeopardise the performance of the turbine. We were asked to clean the components including bolts, diaphragms and fan blades to remove the hard deposits, at first the scale was too tough for our media but we upgraded to a recommended media and the job was completed successfully.

Together with our client we learned from the job and put a plan in place to move forward, we can now repeat the job on the next outage to the highest quality and not put the outage timings at risk.

One of our clients has some stainless steel vessels that were contaminated with a substance that was very difficult to remove, we trialled some cleaning methods and found the most cost effective method of decontaminating and cleaning to a high standard was to blast internally with a soft media. The benefit of this was that the vessels were cleaned to base metal without the polished surface being affected.

During a routine outage of their boiler our client asked us to assist with the cleaning of the gas passes on the fire side to remove acidic deposits and unwanted fouling.

As per normal outages we cleaned the tube surfaces back to bare metal however the air heater was fairly choked up with sulphur and other contaminants. We treated the air heater baskets with a mild chemical mix and washed off after to give quite spectacular results as seen in the before and after pictures above.

Needless to say our client was over the moon!!

Its been quite a hectic couple of months for the company, we have been stretched all over the UK! luckily through our experienced staff and careful planning we have helped keep our clients happy and their plants clean.

Please see some of the recent jobs which have kept us busy.

Decontamination of tank farm

Our client was left with a tank farm full of light end products after the factory had shut down. our task was to decontaminate the 9 tanks, pumps, vessels and associated pipework leaving the plant free from contaminants.

Pigging gas pipelines

We were called at very short notice to pig clean 8", 14" and 16" fuel gas pipelines feeding critical equipment on Carrington CCGT. We responded and sent over 100 pigs through the pipes.

Package boiler descale

After another insurance inspection we were called in overnight to descale a 7,000kg/hr package boiler for a factory in England. production was reduced to a minimum while the boiler was offline, luckily we got the boiler clean and back online in minimum time.

Blasting turbine sections

During the boiler outage our client found deposits on critical turbine diaphragms. Silica and aluminium were the main ingredients and we took them offsite, blasted all of the contaminants off and returned the sections to site.

Cooling water systems

Cooling water pipework is quite prone to scale up in all areas of our industries. We took the pipework away in sections and cleaned them offsite. Initially our client was planning to replace with new pipework, we cleaned the sections back to almost new at 12% of the cost of renewing.

Also boiler neutralising, depot pickling, supplying supervision and consultancy to another chemical cleaning company, cleaning oil tanks and high velocity flushing partially blocked pipes over 1km long.

We were asked to supervise the chemical cleaning of 2 x 80 MW boilers in the Sudanese capital Khartoum.

James Smith attended and the job went very well indeed, due to the success there has been enquiries at other power plants in the country. The picture is of the steam drum after the clean.