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Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Pine Beach, NJ

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Alternative to Pickling with Hydrofluoric Acid

We recently installed 3 new Fermenting/Storage Beer Tanks in our Brewery here in Trinidad. Our problem is that there is a restriction on importing dangerous chemicals such as HF and Nitric Acid takes about 3 months to arrive when ordered. We need to perform the pickling and passivation procedure on our vessels...Can anyone recommend a method and the alternative chemicals necessary that may help us achieve our objective.

Kindest Regards,

A lot depends on what you call pickling. proprietary citric acid passivation might be enough. Talk to the folks that advertise at this site for more information.
Electropolish is an option, but it is a more costly initial setup and requires attention to detail.

Rampaul,

There are certainly alternatives to nitric/hydrofluoric treatments for your tanks. I would take a step back and decide exactly what your at trying to achieve. I have not run across any food/beverage tanks that are pickled. The surface will be rough and not easy to clean. Use ASTM A967 and ASTM A380 to select an alternative treatment. Media blasting, polishing, and citric acid passivation come to mind before pickling. In addition, if importing these chemicals is difficult, I imagine disposing of them is not easy either. Hope that helps.

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