Water cooled flange used on Hot Blast Main Furnace

[chillwynston]

Good day everybody...

I am a design engineer working for a company that manufactures expansion bellows units, I have received an enquiry for Hot Blast Main bellows for a furnace. the inlet side of the unit will have standard ASA flanges while the outlet side they have specified using water cooled flanges. I have seen a drawing of the unit with the flange on, it looks like a normal flange with a concentric chamber coming off the flange OD housing water, there is an inlet and outlet (BSP) fittings, the temperature is 150C yet this is inside the bellows... I have never come across a water cooled flange before I was just wondering what its used for and how it works and why its used.

Thanks for listening!!!
Mike

 

[PSE]

When I worked a bit with semi-conductor equipment, we used cooled flanges and feed-throughs for sheer survival of the componentry. Temperatures approached the melting point of silicon so you had to have a way of protecting the equipment. Coolant circulated through the flange or feedthrough which was returned to an external chiller. In this way an acceptable micro-environment could be maintained that kept componentry functional.

Hope this helped a little.

Regards,