Preventative Maintenance, without disruption to the customer

Customer:

Major bank in Canary Wharf

Location:

London

Project Timescale:

4 weekends

The brief:

The longest period the PHEs could be shutdown was over a weekend, as there was no bank activity during this time. Therefore, the only options were to install a completely new plate pack into each PHE, as opposed to cleaning and re-gasketing, which would have taken longer.

The solution

To mitigate any potential issues, having more than one PHE offline, the work was planned over four consecutive weekends. We started at “close of play” on Friday night. The heat exchanger was isolated and drained of 2000 litres of water. Due to space limitations in the plantroom, the 550 heat transfer plates (measuring 2.5m x 1m) could only be moved from the loading bay, during the service.

Each heat transfer plate was placed in the frame by hand, to ensure correct alignment. After many hours, the heat exchanger was ready to be tightened/compressed using hydraulic jacks. This process evenly compresses the plate heat exchanger 50mm per cycle, until the correct dimension was reached.

Once the service was completed, the plate heat exchanger was tested to 28 Bar(G) to ensure there was no leaks and then put back into service.

All work was completed by Sunday night, without any disruptions to bank staff or services.