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Glutaraldehyde and Cooling Towers

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swiss8018

Mechanical
Nov 3, 2003
2
Our site has just recently experienced an incident where we dumped 30 years worth of crud from our clearwell into our cooling system. We've been doing a variety of things to clean our cooling towers and heat exchangers, including increased chemical feed.

One of the chemicals we are looking to add is Glutaraldehyde to deal with anaerobic organisms currently seeking permanent residence on our heat exchanger tubes.

After seeing the MSDS on this chemical, a laboratorian became concerned that people on our site will be inhaling mist created by our cooling towers. The concentration in the cooling tower will be no more than 150ppm. From the MSDS, the ACGIH/TLV CEILING is 0.05 ppm or 0.2 mg/m3 for a duration of 15 minutes.

The question I have is if anybody is aware of any studies of this stuff in cooling tower applications, specifically regarding potential health effects by inhaling cooling tower mist for a prolonged period of time? Do any of you have experience in adding this chemical? Does anybody know the average size of cooling tower mist droplets, and the average density we could expect? Any help would be appreciated.

swiss
 
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