How Advanced Rotating Equipment Sealing Technologies Help Improve Operational Efficiency

Maintenance trends and Reliability overview

As many mills plants struggle to maintain profitability, plant management is continuously looking for ways to increasing their internal efficiencies. The biggest impact in overall cost reduction will be to focus on the operating costs of production equipment.

While a systematic approach is the key to any improvement program, basic pump reliability starts with some basic considerations. Any discussion about pump reliability has to contain three elements:

Pump failure analysis

1) You must have a clear picture of what life you should be expecting from the pump’s mean time between repairs.

2) You must maximize the life of the pump components.

3) You should not run to failure and be faced with component failures during process. Predictability is a key variable towards reliability.
 

Basic Mechanical Seal

Packing or seals and bearings account for 90% of your premature pump failures. Years ago, most pump shafts were sealed using rings of soft packing, compressed by a packing gland, but this type of shaft seal required a fair amount of leakage just to lubricate the packing and keep it cool.

With the development of mechanical seals, the industry was provided with a technology that did a far better job of restraining product leakage around the pump shaft using  two very flat surfaces (one stationary and one rotating). Even though these mechanical seal faces also require some (very small) leakage across the faces, to form a hydrodynamic film, this leakage normally evaporates and is not noticeable. Mechanical seals fail for only two reasons. If you damage a component (the damage can be either corrosion or physical damage), or if the lapped seal faces open.

How Advanced Rotating Equipment Sealing Technologies Help Improve Operational Efficiency ?

Chesterton Split Seal 442

Split Mechanical Seal Technology:

Since the introduction in 1986, off-the-shelf split seals have been used throughout all process industries and application throughout the world. Convinced of the advantages of split seals on larger rotating equipment, some industry as the pulp & paper industry also quickly adopted split seal technology on a wide variety of applications including fan pumps, agitators and screw feeders.

SpiralTrac with Split Seal 442

Environmental control: the SpiralTrac Technlogy

In addition to these advancements in split seal technology, a revolutionary environmental control bushing has been introduced to the industry that actively evacuates paperstock from the stuffing box. The combination of the split seal and this SpiralTrac environmental controller allow a strong reduction in seal water usage addressing while mean time between planned maintenance is further extended

Bearing Protection

Chesterton 33K Split Bearing Protector

Following the logic of split sealing technology for the pump shaft, advanced split bearing protectors have been introduced to the market in 2008.  The split bearing protector design eliminates the need and associated cost for equipment disassembly while improving on the seal performance of conventional lip seals. 

The entire article have been published in World Pulp & Paper in June 2012

The authors
Zoltan Homoky - Key account manager Pulp & Paper Industry
zoltan.homoky@chesterton.com

Marco Hanzon - Marketing Manager
marco.hanzon@chesterton.com