Industrial Cooling – Direct Cooling

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KEPD filters have been used in many direct cooling systems, especially in the steel mills.

 Steel mill uses a very large amount of water for its various processes like steel making, casting, and rolling. Water is also used in the quenching of the steel products to achieve the desired tensile strength of the finished products. Very often, water used in the direct cooling system is contaminated with a lot of mill scales and other suspended solids. There is also a substantial amount of oil and grease as the cooling water is in direct contact with the machinery and equipment.

 Without a proper filtration system and an efficient backwash process, many conventional sand filters will lose its efficiency over a short period of time. The cooling tower will also be fouled up very quickly. All these will lead to many operational problems in the plant, including blockage of water nozzle, scale build-up in pipes, higher water temperature due to inefficiency in the cooling tower, higher maintenance cost, more frequent machine breakdown and lower productivity.

 In most conventional sand filters, we have also seen many cases of sand leakage. This means higher maintenance costs to top up the sand media and inefficient filtering leading to problems listed above. In one case at a rebar rolling mill, the sand leakage from the sand filter was so severe that the sand leaked into the Tempcore box used for quenching. This resulted in frequent nozzle blockage, poor water quality, and excessive wear in the Tempcore box and piping.