Hi, I've been thinking about the solution for cleaning a water-cooled gas cooler and would love to hear some advice from the smarter people with more experience. Description - I will try to roughly explain the concept. Gas Cooler is used to decrease exhaust gas temperature. The exhaust gas temeprature is usually between 450-700 deg C, so You get relatively clean exhaust gas. Water/glycol mixture is used as a coolant. After some time the exhaust gas builds up a deposit layer in form of soot on the tubes surface, fins and inside walls of the cooler (thermophoresis). This has a great impact on thermal conductivity and leads to less efficent cooling and backpressure built up. It is time-consuming and not user friendly to disassemble the cooler and involves work disruption. There are few solutions I've thought about to partially remove the soot inside of the cooler without disassembling: 1. Mehanical: by water vapor or a mixture of water vapor and some chemicals that increase removal rate of deposit layer. 2. Chemical: by powder that decreases melting temperature of soot (soot remover). You will still need to dismount it from time to time and flush it clean, but you increase the operational time without need of disassebling. 1. Mechanical solution Breaking it down into small pieces from the engineering side. If I inject the water inside of the exhaust chamber it will almost instatnly evaporate and will be taken further with the gas flow, partially cleaning the soot deposit. The question is how much and at what rate do I have to inject the water to make it evaporate. If I inject too much at the time, I might end up in situation where not all the water evaporates and lays down on the hot stainless steel surface at the bottom of the cooler. This will likely damage the surface and lead to a leak. If I have the gas flow rate and temperature available, wouldn't it mean that I can somehow calculate the inside diameter of the tube/ lance that have to be used in this case? I would prefer to use a drain port(s) as a placement of the water lance. This way, I could connect the water to the drain port whenever is needed and avoid introducing completely new design (backwards compability). How would you approach this? 2. Chemical solution This is a known solution. I could for instance use this soot cleaner(Link) and connect directly through drain port. Thanks for all the suggestions!
