Air Cooled Heat Exchanger Training Course

Air cooled exchangers are usually the limiting item on a hot day and are rarely instrumented well enough for anybody to know why. Performance degrades through tube side and air side fouling, fan pitch and belt condition, recirculation from poor plot layout, and louvre control that was set once. Because the duty varies with ambient, degradation hides inside normal seasonal variation until the plant has to cut rate. This week covers the thermal behaviour, the mechanical items, and the monitoring that separates fouling from weather.

It runs 7 times over the published calendar, in 6 cities and live online. Every date is the same programme with the same content and the same certificate.

• Explain how duty varies with ambient, airflow and fouling, and quantify each.
• Separate a fouling problem from a hot day using available data.
• Assess fan, drive and louvre condition against the airflow they should deliver.
• Plan cleaning on condition rather than on a calendar.
• Identify a design or layout limitation rather than chasing it as a fault.

Process and operations engineers responsible for cooling, maintenance and mechanical engineers, inspection and integrity staff, and reliability engineers investigating capacity loss.

Short input, then work. Across 5 days of roughly 6 teaching hours each, the balance sits deliberately with the second: a programme where the trainer talks for six hours produces notes rather than capability.

• Your own material

  Exercises run on situations delegates bring, not on a case study written for a different organisation in a different decade.

• A capped cohort

  Small enough that everybody is asked something. Executive programmes are capped tighter still.

• Practice under scrutiny

  The difficult conversation, the challenged assumption, the decision defended out loud. Judgement is not built by watching.

• Something to take back

  Each day ends with a thing you can use on Monday rather than a slide deck you will not reopen.

• A performance assessment of one air cooler, normalised for ambient.
• A monitoring method that would show fouling against weather.
• A cleaning and mechanical inspection plan based on condition.

A GATI certificate recording what you attended, issued after the programme has run and attendance has been taken. Attending at least 80 per cent of the days earns a certificate of completion; attending less earns a certificate of attendance stating exactly what was attended.

Every certificate carries a code that anybody can check against GATI's own record, which is what makes it worth holding. It records participation. This site will not imply one it does not have.