Atex Thermoregulation in Chemical Production

The nature of ingredients, products and processes involved in chemical and pharma production very often generates working environments with high explosion risk. Therefore, thermoregulating units for chemical plants have to be Atex compliant, involving a series of special executions in terms of design and engineering as well as for the selection of materials.

Tempco supplied special Atex thermoregulating units to a chemical company producing additives for chemical products aimed to different markets, such as lubricants, plastics, water and oil.

The customer had heat transfer oil available at high temperatures, +270° C, coming from a boiler in the facility. It allowed to implement a heat recovery solution with an oil/oil heat exchanger on the heating circuit, enabling temperature regulation of products between +10° and +200° C. Because of the chemical Atex environment, the oil/oil exchanger was the most challenging part of the project, using diathermic oil at very high temperatures.

First of all, it required an accurate evaluation of materials’ expansion rates on heat exchangers, pipings and internal connections. In addition, the use of flange connections and/or welded ones within the unit allowed to avoid any risk of high temperature diathermic oil leakage.