Wear of equipment in our industry is not on most people’s minds nor check books.
There is no ROI on any of your shops’ equipment if your ablity to process chips is stopped because your chip processing system is non-functional due to a foreseeable and preventable wear failure.
Here are 6 wear abatement strategies for the world of high abrasion, high impact, 60-G force chip wringing and fluid recovery:
- Make sure high wear surfaces are easily replaceable; liner, screen, top cover, discharge housing;
- Make sure that abrasion resistant materials are properly specified for those parts subject to sliding friction;
- Protect specific areas such as impact zones, liner, and vanes and key structural welds with hard facing;
- Use Grade 1 screen material to maximize life of separation area;
- Manganese steel is a choice for areas encountering both sliding and impact wear;
- Nickel hardened castings can be used for critical transitions and joints in air discharge style equipment.
Just as we use specialized coatings to maximize output on our tools, selecting specialized materials for critical components in balance of plant equipment like chip processing equipment can assure durability and routine operation instead of creating another maintenance headache to add to the list.
For most of us, wear abatement strategies are limited to getting the right coatings on our tools and using the proper cutting oil. Yet we are vulnerable to wear failures in our balance of plant anciliaries such as chip wringers and processors.
In my steel cold finishing mill, I had shot blasters for removing scale from hot rolled bars. These shot blasters used 4140 Q&T hardened steel shot that literally ate the machines up from the inside out due to abrasive wear.
I remember increasing uptime and service life in my blasters by strategically placing hardfacing and upgraded components, just as the Prab strategies discuss.
I hope you never lose a shift of production because of lack of attention to high wear applications somewhere critical in your shop…
Where else in our shops is abrasive and sliding wear a vulnerability?
Nanosteel (photocredit)
