High-pressure cleaning machines play a crucial role in the cleaning of equipment in food factories. During the production process of sugar manufacturing equipment, severe scaling occurs in pipelines and containers such as evaporation tanks, heaters, crystallization tanks, and saturation tanks, with thickness ranging from a few millimeters to over ten millimeters, which can even block the pipelines in severe cases. The working principle of a high-pressure cleaning machine is to pump high-pressure water through a high-pressure pump or booster, which then reaches the nozzle via a high-pressure pipeline. The high-pressure nozzle converts the high-pressure, low-flow rate water into a low-pressure, high-flow rate jet (high-pressure water jet). The powerful impact force of the high-pressure water jet is used to impact the objects being cleaned, stripping and removing the dirt, thus achieving the purpose of cleaning. Its specific application in equipment cleaning in sugar factories is as follows.
During the production process of the sugar factory, due to the adoption of a four-effect low vacuum belt washing thermal system, every 10 days during the beet production period, a tank needs to be boiled and washed, with a belt washing cycle of about 45 days. Each production period involves approximately three belt washing cycles, and it requires boiling alkali and using steel brushes to remove pipeline dirt. The cost of soda ash and labor each time amounts to more than ten thousand yuan. Every two months or so, the sugar factory's heaters also need to be acid-washed once, and the charging tank and condenser need to be descaled once. The cost of acid washing and descaling labor in each production period reaches tens of thousands of yuan. Especially when belt washing the evaporation tank, due to the long-term brushing by operators under high temperatures, the labor intensity increases, and the quality of pipe brushing cannot meet the cleaning requirements, ultimately leading to a prolonged belt washing cycle. This results in the evaporation tank operating at a lower heat transfer efficiency for a long time, increasing energy consumption. This economic loss is much greater than the cost of boiling and brushing the tank. We conducted a cleaning and descaling test on the sugar factory's evaporation tank, heater, charging tank, condenser pipelines, and containers using a high-pressure cleaning machine. The test results are as follows:
1. It takes an average of 30 seconds to clean one heating tube, with a total time not exceeding 60 seconds.
2. The removal rate of scale deposits on the inner wall of the heating tube is over 90%.
3. Using a high-pressure cleaner for cleaning will not damage the inner wall of the pipeline, and it can fully unblock all the blocked heating pipes.
4. When using a powerful rotary spray head to remove scale from equipment such as storage tanks and condensers, the descaling speed is very fast, and there is no damage or deformation to the equipment surface.
5. The wastewater from high-pressure cleaning machines, after filtering through a filtration system, can be recycled, thus saving costs. Tests have proven that high-pressure cleaning machines greatly facilitate the cleaning of pipelines and containers in sugar factories. So far, nearly a hundred sugar factories in China have adopted this equipment, completely replacing traditional cleaning methods that involve boiling away scale with large amounts of acid and alkali.