Coke rescue story

Coca Cola Bottling plant Mexico:

Plant uses bottling equipment I surmise that is surplus from the 1950’s shipped down from the states.

They still refill bottles there and the method of washing them out inverts the bottles and sprays them inside and out with a caustic solution and hot water. This caustic was eating the copper tubes in the heat exchanger, thus contaminating the rinse water with chemically treated boiler water. This in turn shut down the complete bottling line. We responded to the emergency service call and met the “challenge” by hand forming temporary replacement tubes to get the heat exchanges up and running.  We designed new stainless steel heat exchanger tubes that were compatible with the 50 year old equipment. There has not been a failure of the new tubes to date.