Industrial power generation engines need lubricating oil to protect moving parts, improve performance and allow the right working conditions to internal components, requiring oil cooling applications for turbines, endothermic engines, alternators bearings, hydraulic and oleodynamic centrals. Rapid movements in mechanical machinery, such as rotating or sliding parts, pistons, cylinders, bearings and other gears, generate a high amount of thermal energy, absorbed by hydraulic oil that consequently needs to be cooled.

A plate heat exchanger is an oil cooling application in power generation industrial facilities for engines and activation units. It provides several benefits:

  • Compact design
  • High and quick thermal exchange rate
  • No liquid leaks
  • Long life machinery service
  • Low maintenance

Engine oil has the function of lubricant and protecting fluid, preventing metal parts from wear, rust and corrosion, inhibiting oxidation at high working temperatures. But it also has to cool mechanical moving parts dissipating heat from mechanical components. This function increases the temperature of the oil itself, absorbing the thermal energy generated by the machinery and loosing its physical lubricant and protecting characteristics due to overheating.

Viscosity is the most important property of an oil and its lubricating purposes. The viscosity of an oil must be high enough to maintain a thin protecting and lubricating oil film, avoiding direct contacts between mechanical parts, scratching and friction, but not too high that it blocks the lubricating oil flow around all the mechanical parts.

Lubricant engine oil viscosity depends largely on oil temperature. Engine oil creates a thin film between moving parts, providing a lubricating and cooling coating to mechanical gears, minimising the scratching and friction contact that wears and damages components, avoiding moving components degradation and machinery failures, increasing an engine’s life service and performance. Regardless, the moving of engine components against each other still generates friction, converting energy into heat, absorbed by the oil that looses its lubricant power. This gained heat must then be shed to a subsystem, an oil cooler system.

An oil cooling system is a vital power technology application to maintain a constant and correct oil working temperature, ensuring the right viscosity in order to lubricate and protect the equipment’s components and ensure the right work conditions of the whole engine, gear boxes and mechanical parts.

Tempco’s T Plate range of brazed plate heat exchangers are the best solution for hydraulic oil cooling, as they are light, compact, durable and leak proof, with fast and extreme heat dissipation capacity. A plate heat exchanger can achieve engine oil cooling by both ambient air or water, maintaining oil supply to a suitable, constant work temperature, prolonging life of the engine, a motor or an authomatic transmission, dissipating heat and avoiding failures of the lubricating and cooling properties of the engine oil.

Brazed heat exchangers by Tempco in the T Plate and T Plate B series are often used on thermoregulating machinery that represents the perfect solution for oil cooling in industrial engines and power technology applications. Tempco’s plate heat exchangers for hydraulic oil cooling applications maintain the optimal oil temperature and the perfect viscosity, dissipating the heat gained by the hydraulic oil during the lubricating process.

Tempco brazed heat exchangers ensure maximum efficiency and operational reliability, fast and prompt heat transfer thanks to high plates surface, have a compact and light design, and due to lack of gaskets they require almost no maintenance at all, and allow an easy installation and assembly, with excellent resistance to high temperatures and pressure, 200+300°C, f.v. +50 bar.

Brazed heat exchangers of the T Plate and T Plate B range are available in different mixes of plate materials and brazing.

Plate materials:

  • AISI 316
  • AVESTA 254 SMO (only some types)

Brazing material:

  • Copper
  • Nickel

An oil cooler is a crucial mechanical subsystem that enhances an engine’s life service and performance, inserted in the productive cycle to remove excess of heat absorbed by the oil by thermal transfer for direct contact with hot equipment. An increased temperature of engine oil lubricant lowers the performance of the lubricating fluid, damaging bearings and gears. Not having engine oil at the best suitable temperature means that the service life of the whole equipment is dramatically compromised, and it also means more frequent maintenance for oil change, with considerable oil usage leading to higher oil consumption, high pollutant exhausted oil production and discharge, and higher maintenance costs.

A brazed plate heat exchanger is the perfect solution for the maximum productivity of industrial engines and power generation plants.

Please contact Tempco for more information.