Breaking the bundle 

When Prosaw was approached at an international exhibition to provide a system that would saw through heat exchanger tube bundles 3m in diameter, the immediate reaction reflected the fact that none of its standard products offered a solution suitable for the application.

However, Prosaw’s in-house technical design team did in time come up with a solution for cutting through such a large diameter product.

It emerged during discussions that the product in question was a particular type of heat exchanger known as a shell and tube heat exchanger, most frequently used in oil refineries and other large chemical processes.

As the name suggests, this type of product consists of an outer shell, packed internally with a bundle of tubes. To fulfil its function, one type of fluid passes through the tubes and another flows over the tubes in order to transfer the heat. Eventually however corrosion within the tubes is likely to occur, at which point they have to be replaced and the first stage of this process is achieved by sawing through the entire tube bundle.

In response to this challenge, Prosaw designed a special purpose heavy-duty machine which it called HCS-3000 which has a capacity of up to 3,000mm in diameter. Featuring a horizontally mounted bandsaw fitted with a 67mm wide blade, the saw is able to slice through tube bundles in less than one third of the time taken using conventional sawing machines.

The bandsaw is mounted onto a vertical axis, the feed rate of which is very precisely controlled and pre-programmed to be infinitely variable in order to take account of the constantly changing profile of the tube bundle as sawing takes place. There is no operator involvement during the process of cutting the bundles.

Prosaw sales director, Robert O’Brien comments: “We are very proud of our achievement in carefully designing and producing this remarkable system which delivers a massive reduction in process time compared with traditional methods, whilst simultaneously achieving a significantly extended blade life.”

PROSAW www.prosaw.co.uk

 

 

 

Company

Prosaw

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