Mechanical cleaning

A variety of different hand and mechanical tools like scrapers, brushes and special electrically or pneumatically driven heads are used to perform a boiler mechanical cleaning procedure.

The cleaning procedure itself consists of several general steps:

1. Disassembling the system.
2. Deleting contamination with hand and mechanical tools.
3. Washing the cleaned surfaces with water.
4. Also dirty details are soaked in the detergent solution and then washed with water and passivated if necessary.
5. Assembling the system.

Mechanical cleaning method has a number of advantages. This procedure is simple and does not require complicated and highly expensive cleaning equipment. Also as a rule the use of chemical agents is not necessary, which decreases the cost of the procedure. However, unlike chemical cleaning, mechanical cleaning requires system diassembly to get acess to a numerous inner surfaces inaccesible while the system is assembled. This means the increase of a cleaned system down time in comparison to that of chemical cleaning method case, which causes certain expenses increase. Also mechanical cleaning requres acuracy, caution and definite qualification of personnel.

In several cases the configuration of cleaned equipment requres the use of expensive set of packings while assembling. As a whole mechanical cleaning is an auxiliary method, though it's reasonable to use it in cases of extremely high degrees or "stub" contaminations, and also to clean the separate elements of the system.