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Image courtesy of Hexwise.
Improving summer preparedness with digital monitoring of air-cooled heat exchangers to avoid thermal bottlenecks
Industrial facilities across sectors are facing growing pressure to maintain stable operations as rising temperatures push cooling systems closer to their limits. In this context, gaining deeper insight into the real-time performance of air-cooled heat exchangers is becoming essential for preventing hidden inefficiencies from turning into costly production constraints. Digital monitoring technologies are now enabling operators to detect, diagnose, and resolve cooling bottlenecks before extreme summer conditions impact plant performance.
By Pim van Ramshorst, Chief Business Officer and Co-Founder, Hexwise
Across many industrial sectors, including oil refining, petrochemicals, power generation, and gas processing, reliable heat removal is a prerequisite for stable and efficient operations. Large parts of these industries depend on air-cooled heat exchangers( ACHEs), air-cooled condensers( ACCs) and hybrid cooling towers to cool processes with ambient air. These systems often serve critical functions such as condensing vapors, cooling process streams, and controlling pressures in distillation or turbine systems. When cooling capacity becomes constrained, the consequences quickly propagate throughout the plant resulting in higher process temperatures, elevated turbine backpressure, reduced throughput, and increased energy consumption. These risks become particularly visible during periods of extreme heat. Recent European heatwaves have shown how sensitive industrial operations can be to cooling limitations. During the summer of 2023, several European refineries reported reducing crude throughput by up to 10 % due to cooling constraints, while other facilities experienced production reductions of 5 – 10 % during peak temperature periods as well. As climate change increases both the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, these thermal bottlenecks related to cooling systems are expected to become more common. For plant operators, improving summer preparedness increasingly means ensuring that cooling systems are capable of delivering their full design
48 Heat Exchanger World May 2026 www. heat-exchanger-world. com