Pulling of a stuck bundle from a Heat exchanger

[thocho37]

Hi, experienced professionals,
We have an issue with pulling a bundle.
Bundle cannot be pulled and it got stuck with coke in between tubes and shell.
Is there any means to melt/liquefy the solid coke so that it will get loosed and can be pulled.
Please advice.
Regards,

 

[epoisses_]

Can you close the shell again or is the bundle stuck half-way out?

First analyse what exactly is in there, is it really coke or rust?
The cleanest solution I guess is to close the shell and flush it if you can, in a continous loop, adding heat and chemicals as required, depending on what the fouling is, and obviously filtering out what comes out. Talk with reputed chemical cleaning companies. That will not clean the bundle completely but should hopefully allow you to pull it out for further cleaning.

If the bundle is stuck half-way out, then it gets messy. You can try to jackhammer around the bundle but you may damage some tubes.

Maybe you want to jackhammer in all cases, lining up the first solution may easily take you 1 or 2 weeks.

 

[Longinthetooth]

A D9 cat and a long chain worked well for us.