BOC-leading provider of industrial, medical & special gases

Leaks affect a plant in multiple ways, from reducing process efficiency and losing out on valuable product, to providing risks of slippage and in extreme cases severe risk to life.

What was the problem?

 Every operations & maintenance team on a plant seeks to keep these incidents to a minimum and mostly succeed. But where this isn’t the case, it is essential to have partners and suppliers on hand that can provide support in an emergency.

Ammonia is a substance that when it begins unexpectedly leaking from a PHE cooler, results in a plant being shut down because of the inherent safety concerns. When the client is BOC and bottling that Ammonia is also a key part of its business, the impact is doubled through loss of product as well as production shutdown.

Heat Exchange Group’s team has worked extensively with BOC sites across the country. When their ammonia cooler PHE sprung a leak, we were the first company that they called on. We immediately collected the unit and brought it to our workshop.

The unit needed to be fully repaired, pressure tested and recommissioned for BOC as soon as possible, with zero compromise on quality and safety of the operations.

What did we do?

 Once the unit arrived at our workshop our extensive team of engineers began examining the unit to determine the cause of the leak.

While initially it had appeared to the customer that the gaskets were damaged. When examination by our experienced experts, it was evident that the gaskets had not swollen through chemical damage or been damaged through wear and tear. Instead, the bolts had been overtightened and torqued, resulting in physical deformation and leading the unit to leak.

Once this became clear, we ordered new gaskets on the fastest courier delivery. With the gaskets arriving in two days, we cleaned, re-gasketed, tightened, pressure tested with additional leak checks applied and shipped back to the customer within 24 hours.

What were the results?

BOC benefitted from our service by expert engineers in a number of ways:

• MONEY SAVED – They retained valuable product that they were at risk of losing.
• PLANT OPERATIONS – They could restart the plant immediately with our support, not losing out on further production downtime.
• SAFE COLLEAGUES, SAFE ENVIRONMENT – Heat Exchange Group explained that overtightening a unit can be counter-productive to reducing a leak.