How Split Seals Can Help You to Save on Maintenance Costs

Seal maintenance on large rotating equipment such as large pumps, can be a time-consuming and costly exercise. As a maintenance manager, you want to find out if using split seals can make your team spend less time on maintaining seals, and if they can help you to reduce costs.

What are Split Seals?

Split mechanical seals are mechanical seals whereby all the parts are split into at least two halves. Like standard non-split mechanical seals, they are used on rotating equipment, such as pumps, mixers and agitators. And like standard mechanical seals, they seal the rotating shaft of the equipment against its housing.

Split seals were first used on the submarine main propeller shafts back in 1954. But only in 1986, were split seals introduced to the process industries as a standard, off –the-shelf available sealing technology.

Since the first generation split seal was introduced, many technological improvements have been made and integrated into the latest generation of split seals. These improvements have greatly expanded the window of operation and application of split seals.

"split seals can perform the same duty as standard mechanical seals. The benefit is the fact that the equipment does not need to be dissassembled for installation of a split mechanical seal."

Why use Split Seals? 

The fact that there is no need for equipment disassembly is the single biggest benefit of using split seals.  Split seals eliminate the need for removing anything from the pump except the seal. As split seals can be installed, in place and typically by one installer, without removing the pump, motor or coupling, they simplify the repair process and eliminate the associated costs with typical solid seal replacement.

But there are some important additional cost savings that  you achieve by installing split seals on your rotating equipment, especially when your equipment is now packed:

• Installing split seals will eliminate sleeve wear and associated maintenance interventions and costs.
• There is no more need for packing adjustments adjustments.
• Split seals will eliminate gland leakage and associated housekeeping costs, and corrosion of your assets.

The benefit  increases with the size of the equipment.  While there may not be a benefit to using split seals on small pumps, the savings start to add up with increasing shaft sizes. For single stage centrifugal pumps, a positive Return On Investment (ROI) typically starts at shaft sizes is greater than 2.5”/65 mm.  However, on specialty equipment and double ended pumps, the ROI starts at even smaller shaft sizes.

Where Can I Use Split Seals?

Split seals can be used on large pumps that pump water based fluids.  These include (raw) water intake pumps, effluent pumps, boiler feed pumps, cooling water pumps, sewage pumps, brine pumps, fan pumps, mixer, agitators and so on.

By Marco Hanzon
Marco Hanzon is Marketing Manager at A. W. Chesterton Company. Before getting involved in the Marketing of Mechanical Seals, Marco worked as an In-Field Support Engineer for mechanical seals.