Exp 402T

BOX Deferred Maintenance

It had likely been at least a year, maybe longer, since both the water-cooled and air-cooled Haskris systems had gone through a complete purge, so they were each due for one. The filters for each chiller had some slight sediment accumulation but both systems had significant slime and film buildup coating the filters and reservoirs. They should be good for X403 and into demob, but upon installation at the iGCR, a 6 month cleaning cycle might be better, or yearly at the minimum.

Some notes and changes to the protocol:

• While it is technically possible to do the purges solo, I would highly recommend it being a two person job. I did it solo and it was a miserable job, with scrambling, water spills, and dripping with sweat from the air-cooled Hasrisk. I would not attempt it solo again!

• It's easiest to use a wet vac to evacuate out the final water from the reservoirs. I attempted mopping it out with rags and ended up having mop the floor afterwards.

Sump and Chill-water Notes

• The sump was ready to be emptied at the BOX and will be continually monitored throughout the expedition and emptied when necessary. Otherwise, the sump seems to be very effective and only in a bout a 5 minute job to clean with zero interruption in cooling the cryomech.

• The ship chill-water seems nice and clean this time. Thank you to the SEIM engineers. Yay.
   

Exp 401

Changes to the Plumping + new Sump/Sediment Trap

Upon arriving to the ship, the SRM was on the backup air-cooled haskris as the heat exchanger was clogging up very rapidly after the maintenance during the tie-up. 400T tech  had installed a system for filtering the chill water. The actual filter would clog so quickly that the filter was removed and used instead as a sump or sediment settling stage. The photo everyone has seen from 400T is what was collected from this filter/sump stage.
 
During our cross-over, we cleaned the sump/filter and the heat exchanger. The following photos show the sludge bucket from collecting the water when removing the sump cover and then coarse sediment in the sink after dumping the bucket.

Open	Open
Removing/cleaning the sump and an example of coarse sediment build up within hours of cleaning.

The temperature was stabile for about an hour but then begin to climb slightly. And then rapidly. Eventually it rose 10°  F in 2 hours while the Haskris itself was set its minimum set point of 55°  F.  The filter was removed and not reinstalled, since it was just clogging. The screen in the wye filter was also removed. At this point the haskris maintained temperature better, but a set point of 63°  F was necessary to achieve 65°  F implying that the heat exchanger was already losing efficiency. At this point, the system was switched back to the air-cooled haskris to stabilize temperature in order to trap a new null-field in the SRM while still in port.
 
Throughout this time, the current Siem crew re-installed the bag filters on their end of the system. Over the past few days, the state of the chill water has improved dramatically. (The bag filters are something that has been done with the crew I sail with the past two expeditions and has mostly mitigated all issues with the haskris. The filters seem even more necessary after any work or treatment is done on the chill water system as rust-scale and junk comes loose and then circulates in the system [being filtered by the haskris heat exchanger], but still seems like it should be a constant practice and the water is clear, they will not need changing very often.)
 
A bypass circuit around the sump was installed to allow the sump to removed and cleaned, while still keeping the SRM on the water cooled haskris sytem. This was all done with SS hardlines with swagelock fittings. The previous install for the filter using rubber house was also switched to hard lines and the wye filter was removed all together. The sump itself was installed backwards, since the filter will not be used, because after experimenting this allows for more efficient settling. The below photos are of the sump and bypass circuit with annotations. Also, it is difficult to see how much cleaner the water is, so a closeup photo of the actual settled sediment and water is shown in the next set of photos

The sump was emptied and cleaned on 12/27 and 1/23 (~2 and 4 weeks build-up, respectively) and is clearly getting better. At the crossover, we will clean the sump again as a training excercise.

Assuming that Siem continues to do their filtration and now the ability to easily clean the sump without switching to the air-cooled haskris, it seems we are able to maintain temperature at a steady 69° F which keeps the compressor oil at a happy ~83° F, but of course, we will continue to closely monitor the temperatures and sump collection.

Exp 400T

• Changes to the plumping + new settling pond/filter
  
  

  See X400T Pmag tech report for details - will try to make time to update this page as well

Exp 398P

• Main Haskris likely fixed: At the start of 398P the heat exchanger was removed and very thoroughly cleaned multiple times with HCl (about 25%) and by pressure-washing it backwards to the normal circulation. The heat exchanger withstood this treatment, although care should be taken in regards to potential nickel-content in future washings. You likely don't want to let it sit with acid over night.

• If you are to clean out the heat exchanger with water, ONLY use pressure-washer in the reverse direction of normal flow. This should easily remove the stuck debris (since it is put in place against the pull of gravity, by water of much lower flow-rate), and most importantly, won't lodge the debris further in to the heat exchange.

• Never manually adjust the flow regulator valve by turning anything other than the plastic gear-wheels by hand (try to avoid that as well). Manually adjusting the valve will result in the flow regulator ceasing to function, and will require disassembly + re-installation to work again.

Exp 397

• Rise in temperature of the Main Haskris WW1: Main Haskris rose in temperature at the beginning of the expedition (October 17, 2022).

It happened again on November 8, 2022. This time, the rise in temperature was higher, up to 75°F. We removed the wye filter, installed during Exp 397T, to clean it with isopropyl and we found some rusty debris inside.

It was also noticed that the actuator/valve allowing the ship chill water to flow in has some issue with its gear and does not respond properly. The valve was fully open and should be kept widely open until further notice. The radiator/heat exchanger was removed for cleaning with high pressure water (catwalk) - same rusty debris inside were also observed. The Haskris water reservoir was drained and the filter inside the reservoir was cleaned. Recommendation by Garrick is to clean the radiator/heat exchanger regularly (every 6 months/a year) to remove the rusty deposits. The Main Haskris kept rising in temperature regularly during the expedition triggering Buzzbox alarm many times and the use of the backup Haskris. The Haskris and ship chill water temperatures were checked regularly to monitor any drastic temperature change because it was observed that the ship chill water temperature varies very often.

Some of the alarms may have been false alarms. [Mark's comments] It seems that the default alarm threshold for the Cryomech input water is 70°F. 70°F is still a safe water temperature for the input but if the user does not manually set the desired alarm thresholds, the alarm state will be triggered prematurely. Unfortunately, the Cryowatch VI cannot be revised until the SMDR_svr.vi driver license is renewed. In speaking with Bill Mills, this sounds like an expensive option. He suggested an alternative is to develop our own driver. On another note about labview, after the computer replacement were made on Exp 397P, the labview library used to develop the buzzbox VI which interfaces between labview and the arduino is also missing. This is a free library called LINX, downloaded through the labview package manager and installed on the SRM computer. The VI was written on the kappabridge computer so that the SRM could stay off internet.

• The heat exchanger on the main Haskris was removed on November 16th and cleaned. The heat exchanger was back flushed with water to attempt to dislodge any debris which may be blocking the flow. Although the heat exchanger was full of dirty chill water, no evidence of blockage was observed and water flowed freely in both directions (both on the chill water side and the reservoir side). The piping in the heat exchanger seemed pretty large diameter because there was very little reduction to flow as water was flushed through. The chill water inlet valve was opened while the heat exchanger was removed so that we could observe the flow of chill water coming out of the Haskris valve. Water flowed freely from the valve so there is no indication that the valve is clogged (note that the valve was set to fully open and the valve motor disabled prior to this test as noted above). The hoses leading into and out of the heat exchanger were also removed at this time for inspection and cleaning if necessary. The hoses were generally clean with just a thin coating of slime on the walls; nothing which could obstruct flow. From this exercise, it doesn't appear that there is anything in the Haskris system obstructing the flow of the ship's chill water. The ball valves to cut off the ship's supply/return chill water are pretty decrepit. Perhaps there is an obstruction in the chill water downstream of the Haskris (i.e. the return ball valve). Other possibilities could be the Haskris pump impeller itself. The X-ray Haskris had issues a few expeditions back with cavitation casing the impeller to fail. That problem had some pretty serious grinding noises associated with it though.

• Cryolog files for 2019-March 2022, compiled by Maggie during Expedition 392, are available at IODP_Share>PMag>Pmag_Health>Cryolog files 2019-2022. Data from March 2022 are also found there. The data compilation shows that the in-water of the Haskris water chiller has increased over the last year, since October 2021. It is around 70°F for Expedition 397.
  
  

Instrument Resources

User Guides

• Cryomech Compressor and Haskris Water Chillers

• Haskris flow regulator valve cheat-sheet

Vendor Manuals

• Haskris_LX-Series-Manual (air cooled water chiller)

• Haskris-Chiller-Maintenance-2818.pdf (Main Haskris)

• Haskris flow regulator valve manual (Blue thing regulating flow of ship cool water)