18/7/2006

 
Daryl Hansford

Maintenance Improvement Co coordinator

Ph 03 58246243
Mobile 0407 568142

 
To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing about our experience with the installation of the Hydrosmart 40 that we installed on a culinary steam generator in our MSD1 plant on the 20th of February 2006.
This steam generator has been in our plant since 1993 and has never had chemicals added to control scale build up due to its use as a culinary steam generator producing steam that comes in to direct contact with milk concentrate in our infant formula plant.
Each year we shut the plant down for maintenance and one of the tasks is to strip down the steam generator and descale it.
This task has taken us up to five days and involves acid cleans, high pressure blasting, etc, etc, the fouling is normally to the point that we can not see a path through the tube pack, with us using this cleaning technique it has cost us many thousands of dollars each year.
We fitted the Hydrosmart unit on a Monday and on the following Friday we opened it up to find approximately ten kilograms of scale had come off the tube pack and was lying in the bottom of the steam drum.
We took photos at that stage and returned it back to service till the 13th of June where we opened it up for its annual inspection and clean, to find another ten kilograms of scale had been removed. This time we removed the tube pack from the steam generator for a thorough inspection and found the complete tube pack had about 80% of the scale already removed, we could see through from one side to the other so we closed it up with new gaskets and that was our annual inspection completed, about six hours work.
The steam valve that supplies steam from the boiler house to the steam generator generally runs at 50% opening, since installing the Hydrosmart unit the valve has reduced to 40% opening which equates to about a 20% energy saving.
The hydrosmart unit has proved itself as the total solution to our water treatment for our culinary steam generator and we look forward to trialling the Hydrosmart unit across the Tatura Milk site on other equipment that may benefit from the technology.

Yours truly,

 
 
Daryl Hansford.