Why does nobody talk about how bad tube sheets warp on older heat exchangers?

I spent 10 years working on new builds and never saw it this bad. Then I got a job in Houston last summer retubing a 30 year old exchanger at a chemical plant. The tube sheet had warped nearly a quarter inch across the face. Everyone on site just wanted to hammer the new tubes in and call it done. I said hold up, that's gonna cause leaks and stress fractures down the line. The foreman told me I was overthinking it, that we'd done it this way for 20 years. I pushed back and spent a Saturday with a dial indicator mapping out the whole face. We ended up having to machine it flat on Sunday and lost two days of production. But you know what? After restart, we had zero tube leaks in the first month. Has anyone else dealt with tube sheets that bad and had to fight to fix them right?

2 comments

2 Comments

joseph93224d ago

Did your buddy run into any issues with the welds after machining it down? A guy I used to work with said his crew tried that once and the reduced thickness caused cracking a few months later.

riley_price24d ago

My buddy Dave did that to a set of truck bumpers he was building. Machined the welds down flat for a cleaner look, and about four months later a hairline crack showed up right along the bead on one of them. He had to grind it out and reweld the whole thing, which was a pain since it was already powdercoated.