Abstract
During the life of a pipeline, a piece of process equipment or an entire process plant, it may become necessary to chemically clean them to remove deposits, scales and foulants. Identification of the inorganic scales and deposits such as iron oxides, copper oxides, water hardness salts, etc., and common methodologies to remove those undesirable materials are documented in several textbooks, manuals, chemical cleaning contractors’ literature as well as variety of technical papers and other publicly available resources. The techniques and practices to remove the inorganic portions of the deposits are outside the scope of this discussion. This paper concentrates on the removal of non-coke hydrocarbon deposits, which is both problematic and poorly understood in many areas of pipeline and process cleaning operations.
Focusing on the removal of the non-coke hydrocarbon foulants, i.e. organic materials, many generic and proprietary chemical blends are commercially available. Cost, environmental and safety information is generally obtainable from publicly available literature or from vendor-supplied documents. Exact identification of the hydrocarbon contaminants is usually prohibitively expensive; therefore, the only information commonly available is a wide-spectra “family” of compounds. When evaluating different cleaning solutions for hydrocarbon foulants, a performance or effectiveness criterion is selected. In this paper, a simple, semi-quantitative testing method is presented to assist in evaluating different cleaning solutions’ performance. The results of testing several commercially available cleaning solutions are given validating the applicability of this new approach
