Fouling in a Condenser of a Chiller and algae in the Cooling Tower

Transpek Silox is one of the oldest chemical factories in the state of Gujarat in India. When build, the factory has been far outside the city borders, but today the city is all around the place. This makes the dumping of water for this factory critical. The authorities allow only a certain quantity of polluted water to be dumped in their waste water system of the city. The infrastructure of the city has not grown as fast as the city itself, so the waste water plant is running at its limit. This forces the company to run their cooling towers with a very high concentration of TDS. High concentration of TDS and as well Calcium carbonate is responsible for heavy scaling in the condenser as well in the cooling tower itself. The added antiscaleant chemicals showed only very little improvement. Also the cooling tower dedicated only to this condenser shows a lot of algae, even when adding a lot of biocide to the cooling water. Condenser cleaning, therefore has been a regular task for the maintenance department. Even when doing regular cleaning of the condenser, there have been now and than emergencies, where they have to shut down the system due to blocking inside the condenser, and insufficient performance of the chiller. The algae in the cooling tower contaminated the cooling loop and has additionally reduced the performance of the system, and beared the risc of biofilm in the loop.

A look inside the condenser or underneath the cooling tower speaks a clear language. The condenser is always full of scale and corrosion, in the cooling tower the algae have formed thick layers of algae.
A few weeks after the installation of the MERUS Ring in the loop of the cooling tower and the condenser, the condenser has been due to scheduled cleaning. Even if maintenance have already recognized a very positive development on the cooling tower itself, the condenser was anyhow opened in order to see the results inside the condenser.
As can be clearly seen at the pictures above, the condenser lost almost all its scale, the tube entrance is totally clean. Whereas algae have grown in long strings before, there are only traces and spots of algae found.
Seeing this results, customer stopped adding any kind of chemicals to treat the water. Even having concentrations of more than 10,000 TDS in the cooling water, fouling or scaling do not start again.