Servicing plate heat exchangers in food and beverage applications

Plate heat transfer technology plays a vital role in a wide scope of duties in the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries. In these applications, keeping your heat exchanger operating properly is not only about ensuring high production availability. It’s also about ensuring the safety and quality of your products.

With a global service organization and a deep understanding of heat exchanger performance in food and beverage applications, Alfa Laval can support you throughout the entire lifecycle of your equipment: from installation and commissioning, to routine and proactive maintenance, to training, spare parts, troubleshooting and more. No matter the brand of heat exchanger, our service offering provides the market’s greatest assurance of both uptime and confident hygienic performance. Keep reading to learn how we work with you to secure the safety of your products as you reduce losses and prevent unplanned production stops to boost profitability.

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Run longer, safer, and better by being proactive

Gasketed plate-and-frame heat exchangers are among the most robust pieces of technology in your production line. You should be able to count on them for years – if not decades – but it takes proper operation and maintenance.

At Alfa Laval, we believe the smartest approach to service is being proactive. We can support you throughout your heat exchanger’s service life, with a range of options designed to help you optimize costs by catching issues early. Not only would you avoid costly problems down the road, but you can also be confident that you’re delivering safe, quality products to your consumers.

Integrity testing

Alfa Laval Integrity Testing is a unique proactive service, specially developed for gasketed plate heat exchangers. With Integrity Testing, our experts help you identify potential problems like cracks in the channel plates, enabling you to take necessary actions early and avoid unexpected breakdowns. This service is particularly valuable for early identification of leaks that can cause contamination in pharmaceutical or food production. With integrity testing, you can better plan maintenance for your heat exchangers and ensure the safety of your product.

Infrared on camera to detect heat

Visual Condition Assessment (VCA)

Thanks to our unmatched heat exchanger expertise, Alfa Laval can perform a visual inspection of your gasketed plate heat exchanger while it is in operation, identifying potential issues before they become major problems. Using infrared camera technology, we also evaluate the actual heat transfer performance of the heat exchanger. We then provide you with recommendations based on our findings and analysis of the thermal images. The result is confidence that your heat exchanger is performing as it should, delivering the production availability and safety that your business depends on.

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A complete offering for dairy processing

Alfa Laval has been a trusted partner to the dairy industry for well over a century. Today, our gasketed plate-and-frame heat exchangers can be found in a wide range of positions in all types of milk and dairy processing applications. To ensure you get the most reliable performance with confident hygienic safety, we also offer a comprehensive range of services and support. Download our brochure to learn how we help you secure the highest uptime over the long service life of your equipment.

Download our service offering for the dairy industry

Total service support for breweries

From the brewhouse and the coldblock, to utilities, filtering, treatment and even packaging, gasketed plate-and-frame heat exchangers are found in every part of today’s modern brewery. It is a critical piece of equipment for making sure you can reliably deliver quality, safe and profitable products to your consumers. That’s why Alfa Laval offers a broad range of services and support to keep your heat exchangers running as they should over the long haul. Download this brochure to learn more.

Download our service offering for breweries

Online troubleshooter - be the expert

A leaking heat exchanger? Reduced thermal performance? Identify the causes of various issues you might experience with your plate heat exchanger, or even better – how to prevent them from happening, through our online troubleshooter. If needed our experienced and skilled troubleshooters are at your service.

Troubleshoot your heat exchangers

Skills and knowledge empower

When you buy Alfa Laval equipment, you buy peace of mind. But you must also rely on your equipment operators to get the job done. That's why competence development is invaluable to your everyday operations. If you have any specific need for training, let us know and we will get back to you soon.

Tips to ensure your parts are genuine:

Look for the Alfa Laval logo on every packaging and part
Ensure the Alfa Laval name and trademark, with the words "Genuine Parts" are printed on the packaging
Review the packing list to ensure that part is genuine
Inspect the part number printed on each packaging

How to order Alfa Laval genuine spare parts

Find your local Alfa Laval office and give us a call or send an email or fill out the form to the right and send us your request. Our local sales office will contact you.

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How long will your gaskets last?

Using Alfa Laval’s proprietary GPredict™ tool, our service advisors can give you a reliable estimate of the expected lifetime of your gaskets. The tool relies on precise calculations based on your specific equipment and relevant application details, including temperature, gasket material, whether you use glued or non-glued gaskets, and how often you open your unit in the course of annual operation. With that, you can plan the reconditioning of your plates, since you always know when it’s time for re-gasketing well in advance. Take advantage of GPredict™ with a customized gasket prediction based on your installation* by contacting us today.

Prediction of gasket lifetime

Gasket material: NBRP

NBRP is Alfa Laval’s unique nitrile performance grade for high temperatures

Max. operation temperature

This temperature range refers to 0-100°C (32-212°F).

100

Estimated number of openings per year

*GPredict™ estimates are valid only for clean water duties, or applications using other fluids that have no chemical impact on the gasket. Gasket lifetime predictions are not available for units that employ aggressive media.

Reconditioning and preventive maintenance

All heat exchangers lose performance over time. Alfa Laval's cleaning equipment (CIP) provide quick and easy in-line cleaning, but we recommend sending the units for recondition on a regular basis to reset the status of your equipment to an as-good-as-new condition.

A Performance Audit by a qualified engineer gives you an assessment of your units' current state, which makes planning for downtime easy. At reconditioning we replace gaskets, upgrade plates or replace damaged ones with Alfa Laval genuine spare parts according to original specification.