Chemical Cleaning of S444

[devaxrayz]

Hello all,

I'm gonna do chemical cleaning for some tube bundle of heat exchanger. The tube was covered by red scale. I think it was iron scale coming from cooling water corrosion.

The tube material was X2CrMoTi 18-2 or known in AISI standard as Stainless Steel 444 (S44400).

I need to know was this material resist to acid chemical such as sulfuric acid? I'm gonna use sulfuric acid because i have a lot of it.

thanx

 

[josephn16]

My guess is you will be OK, but you may want to post this in the Metal and Metallurgy forum.

I can tell you this: Nitric acid is used for a process called "passivation" that is supposed to restore SS to the passive state and stop corrosion. I'm not so sure about the process, we have had only limited sucess with it so far, but 304SS takes the nitric just fine.