Specialty Services: Industrial Field Services
At Altex Industries, we have decades of experience providing mechanical support to Canadian heavy industry. This includes Specialty Services that complement our mechanical turnaround and maintenance services. Altex Industries is there to provide unique services and capabilities that keep your facility running safely.
Engineered Containment Device
Unexpected leaks can cause costly downtime and safety concerns, but Altex Industries has the solution. Our on-line leak-sealing services allow you to address leaks without halting operations. This service is ideal for industries requiring continuous processes, such as petrochemical refineries, power plants, and chemical facilities. Altex Industries’ rapid-response team uses tailored techniques to seal leaks efficiently, ensuring minimal disruption and maximum operational reliability.
Active process leaks cannot wait for a planned shutdown, and conventional repair methods assume a depressurized system that our customers rarely have.
Non-Destructive Leak Repair: Injectable sealants are introduced into compromised joints, gasket faces, and packing areas while the line remains at full pressure and temperature. The compound cures in place, restoring a durable seal without welding, depressurization, or mechanical teardown. The asset stays online, and the surrounding workfront remains undisturbed.
Custom-Engineered Enclosures: For pipe and valve failures that valves alone cannot isolate, we design and deploy high-pressure containment clamps tailored to the specific geometry, metallurgy, and operating envelope of each leak. Each enclosure absorbs the full system load through the failure while the underlying repair is sequenced.
Asset Protection: Containment prevents hydrocarbons, caustics, acids, or high-temperature media from breaching the primary system, buying operations the time to scope a permanent repair and avoid environmental exposure or regulatory escalation.
At Altex Industries, we specialize in delivering customized solutions to manage complex leak-sealing challenges. Our engineered containment devices are designed to isolate leaks effectively in a wide range of piping systems, bonnets, flanges, and valve-packing applications. These devices create a durable mechanical enclosure, ensuring a secure seal even in extreme conditions. Built to handle temperatures from cryogenic levels to 1800°F, our containment solutions comply with provincial pressure equipment safety regulations, offering reliability for both emergency and planned maintenance. Whether isolating a leak or securing a compromised system, our tailored solutions prioritize safety and operational efficiency.
High-Risk Execution in Extreme Environments
- Live-Line Intervention: Our teams work on systems at sustained high temperature, high pressure, or both, where standard lockout cannot be applied without major production loss. Each job begins with a site-specific hazard assessment, written method-of-procedure, and pre-mobilized equipment sized to the actual conditions in the field.
- Specialized Technical Teams: Crews are recruited and retained for surgical precision on irregular, high-stakes tasks, with continuing training in confined-space live work, hot-system entry, and the specialized tooling pressurized environments demand.
- Rapid Emergency Response: Capability is structured to mobilize within hours, with engineered hardware, sealants, cryogenic equipment, and qualified personnel staged for the most common categories of urgent failure.
Specialized Expertise for Critical Plant Continuity
- Minimizing Production Losses: Live intervention typically resolves the underlying failure in hours or days rather than weeks, converting an emergency into a contained engineering exercise and protecting the production plan that a shutdown would have consumed.
- Solving the Unsolvable: We focus on the complex mechanical solutions that fall between routine maintenance and full outage, where the engineering, the tooling, and the judgment of the field crew all have to be right the first time.
- The Altex Industries Standard: Altex Industries is the go-to partner for these specialized Industrial Field Services, delivering the engineered containment and live-system expertise required to keep your plant running safely.
Freeze Plugs
Our nitrogen-based freeze plug technology provides a safe and efficient method for isolating sections of piping systems. This method works with static or no-flow processes, offering a dependable way to manage leaks or facilitate maintenance when a system cannot be shut down. Ice plugs create a temporary but robust seal, allowing work to proceed without compromising the integrity of the entire system. The precision and safety of this method make it ideal for critical situations that demand immediate and effective isolation.
Plug integrity is monitored continuously through redundant temperature measurement, upstream pressure trending, and visual inspection of the freeze zone, with constant communication to the operator’s control room until the plug is safely thawed. Downstream units remain fully operational. Only the exact piping segment targeted is affected, and in the right application, a single freeze plug eliminates the cost basis for an entire shutdown event.
Crimping
Altex Industries’ crimping services offer a straightforward yet highly effective way to control leaks and isolate pipelines. Using hydraulic crimping equipment, we can pinch pipes and install stop rings to prevent shear damage. This method ensures 100% isolation, with material injection available to reinforce the seal if needed. Once the leak is managed, our equipment is safely removed, restoring your system without unnecessary downtime. Crimping is a dependable solution for emergencies or planned maintenance, ensuring safety and efficiency at every step.
Grit Blasting
Regulatory and site-mandated inspection of tubes provides an early warning of the potential for tube failures. Sometimes, due to scaling or fouling products inside a tube, your NDE company is not able to test inside your heat exchanger tubes. Altex Industries has a quick and simple answer for you. We have cleaned many tubes for regulatory inspections using our safe and patent–pending Grit Blasting process. Using our state–of–the–art equipment, we can deliver a very safe grit product that will clean the tubes while ensuring tube integrity. It is vital to keep your tubes safe while getting them ready for inspection, and you can count on Altex Industries with our years of experience in this field.
Contact Altex Industries for Specialty Services
Whether you need Grit Blasting, leak sealing using crimping, an Engineered Containment Device, or any other specialty heat exchanger service, contact Altex Industries for a rapid response to your situation.
