SWEP’s largest brazed plate heat exchanger range provides efficient, compact oil cooling solution

An ideal oil cooling solution for Woerner

Woerner Sistemas de Lubrificação (Lubrication Systems) has been active in the Brazilian market since 1976. Originating from Germany, they have in the fields of mining, steel making, cement, paper manufacturing, and chemistry.

Woerner provides large-scale progressive, double line, and circulatory lubrication systems to these fields. Jock Sistemas de Lubrificação (Lubrication Systems) was established in 1998 and plays a strong role in tooling machine applications in general, such as lathes and milling machines, general CNC machining centers, food industry, monorails, chain sprayers, and the precise dosage of lubricants for assembly lines.  Orifice or resistive, single line, and multiple output type lubrication systems are used in these applications.

Jock Woerner Lubrication equipment

Develop a new product using brazed plate heat exchanger technology

Merged in 2015, the two companies became Jock/Woerner Sistemas de Lubrificação (Lubrication Systems) and continues strongly expanding and providing quality service by supplying the demands of the most varied industrial sectors in Brazil and Latin America.

In this case, Woerner and SWEP have partnered to Woerner develop a new product using brazed plate heat exchanger technology that includes many advances to the system, including:

• Skid decreasing
• Higher performance
• Closer temperature approach

This new product - complete with a SWEP brazed plate heat exchanger installed - is being used within a lube system that is responsible for maintaining the temperature on mill bearings. This application is basically a circulating oil lubrication unit for mill bearings with 8,000L capacity, flow rates of 560L/min, and a maximum pressure of 30 bar.  The equipment is being installed by a large mining company called Mineração Vale Verde and this is the first brazed plate heat exchanger model to be installed in this kind of application in Brazil, making it a huge step for brazed plate heat exchanger technology in the region/market. 

Lubrication Skid equipment showing SWEP B427 model installed

Cutting costs in transport and raw material

In the past, Woerner has commonly used S&T (Shell & Tube) technology in their Skid designs. However, with the smaller brazed plate heat exchanger, the larger area required originally to house the bulky S&T heat exchanger was no longer needed – providing a 70% decrease in space for the customer.  In addition, our compact, but high performing brazed plate heat exchanger reduced the total overall weight of the lubrication equipment while also cutting costs in transport and raw material. The efficiency of our B427Mx200 model (shown here) also provided a close temperature approach in this application, which meant that a smaller pump could be chosen – adding up to even more savings in components and costs!

Although, the B427 model is in one of SWEP’s biggest range of brazed plate heat exchangers known as the XL Range, the brazed plate heat exchangers compact size still won the job over competing, older technologies that require a larger unit to do the same job.

In addition to the high-performing product that SWEP provided, Woerner was also very pleased with the superb level of local support given to them. The SWEP Brazil team assisted them in finding the perfect solution for this job while being able to solve any challenges that arose along the way.

We hope that this successful pairing will lead to future opportunities for SWEP to be Woerner’s trusted heat transfer partner for all their industrial application needs.