NEW APPROACH TO CARGO HEATING

One of the significant marine-engineering developments of recent years, is the change from steam to thermal fluids for the heating of bulk cargoes of heavy oils, edible oils, certain chemicals, tar and bitumen, etc. Although liquid- phase thermal-fluid heating equipment has a close affinity to boiler plants in that it is based on a central heater with conventional pipework, it has none of the problems of pressure, water treatment, chemical dosing, scale, corrosion of frost that are inherent with water, either in its liquid or vapour phases. The fact that thermal fluids remain in the liquid phase at only slightly above atmospheric pressure, right up to their maxima of 300C. or more, is of considerable advantage. From an operational standpoint, liquid-phase thermal-fluid heaters are simpler than boilers, requiring none of the manual duties, such as blowing down; and, furthermore, they have very low maintenance costs. They are therefore, easier to incorporate into fully-automatic ship-control systems and of course, there is no call for space-consuming boiler-feed water tanks. This equipment is being increasingly applied to Belgian, British, Danish, Dutch, French, German and Swedish vessels for heating most types of cargoes that require to be maintained at a temperature above ambient. Thermopac heaters installed for this duty range from 280,000 to 10,000,000 B.T.U./hr., although investigations are currently in hand for utilising heaters with more than twice this capacity. It is interesting to note that many of these systems incorporate secondary heating circuits for pump and pipe tracing, sea-water heating, and fresh-water heating and and steam raising for the crews services.

• Publication Date: 1970-6-4

Media Info

• Pagination: 33 p.
• Serial:
  • Fairplay International Shipping Journal
  • Volume: 235
  • Issue Number: 4528

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Cargo handling; Heating (Structures); Liquids
• Old TRIS Terms: Bulk liquid heating; Cargo heating; Liquid bulk heating
• Subject Areas: Construction; Freight Transportation; Marine Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00005449
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Oct 30 1971 12:00AM