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Plant Maintenance

This Plant Maintenance articles series relates to doing maintenance and care on operating plant and equipment. It includes coverage of maintenance engineering issues, and topics on the maintenance of process plant operating assets and industrial equipment.

The Plant Maintenance series of articles are provided with the permission of Feed Forward Publications and Lifetime Reliability Solutions.

NOTE: The series does not include coverage of related commercial or vendor software or database management applications.

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Pressure Flange Seal For Liquid Filter Pressure Vessel

Pressure Flange Seal For Liquid Filter Pressure Vessel

Pressure Flange Seal For Liquid Filter Pressure Vessel. When a leak occurs between pressure flanges and the arrangement cannot be successfully sealed, it is necessary to change the sealing design. This article explains a successful modification done to the lid and body flanges of a vertical pressure leaf filter used to remove particulate from a liquid stream. It incorporates a ‘tongue and groove’ sealing arrangement, with the ‘tongue’ in the lid flange and the recess in the filter body flange.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Bucket Elevator Shaft Seal Design Quadruples Bearing Life

Bucket Elevator Shaft Seal Design Quadruples Bearing Life

Dust ingress into bearings is one of the great causes of premature bearing failure on bucket elevators. By selecting the right bearing housing and position, combined with this special dust seal arrangement, you can get quadruple the bearing life. The article provides the full details of the low pressure dust leak seal design along with a sketch of the successful set-up.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Process Instruments For Difficult And Corrosive Environments

Process Instruments For Difficult And Corrosive Environments

There is always a degree of uncertainty in selecting instrumentation for difficult or corrosive environments. Material selection for chemical compatibility involves a strained decision between cost and equipment reliability and longevity. The other major uncertainty is whether the instrument is appropriate for the application – will it repeatedly give truly representative readings all it’s operating life? This article presents a list of instrumentation successfully used in a range of difficult and chemically demanding environments.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Highly Reliable Cyclo-Drive Gearboxes With Grease Lubrication

Highly Reliable Cyclo-Drive Gearboxes With Grease Lubrication

The cyclo-drive gearbox is a variation of a planetary gearbox. They have the added advantage of not using gear teeth to drive the shafts; rather they use an internal offset cam arrangement to drive rolling pins that turn a cycloidal wheel inside the gearbox. The rollers are capable of taking 500% overload without breaking the gearbox. One other benefit of the cyclo-drive gearbox for users is that many models are grease filled and do not use oil.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Acid Sparge and Acid Sparging

Acid Sparge and Acid Sparging

Acid Sparge And Acid Sparging. When you want to introduce acid directly into a liquid below its surface a sparge pipe is used. It is necessary to select materials that are compatible with the chemicals and the process. This article explains the issues to address when selecting the sparge pipe materials for injecting acid into a process reactor and what to consider when designing and installing the sparge pipe into such vessels or tanks.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Air Mover and Air Amplifier Problems.

Air Mover and Air Amplifier Problems.

Air Mover And Air Amplifier problems! Touted as great maintenance savers and a very efficient means of moving large volumes of air, they can in fact be extremely energy hungry. Based on using a small amount of compressed air to draw through a large amount of entrained air they can cause huge energy waste if an air compressor is run in order for the air mover to operate. It is wasteful to install an air mover on a plant air system unless the air compressor is always running well under peak demand.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Budgets — What to Do and How to Use Them

Budgets — What to Do and How to Use Them

Budgets represent plans or expectations for the future! They are a means to plan, forecast, coordinate and control the activities needed to achieve the business’ objectives. The budget document contains the amount of money that has been allocated to achieve those goals and the timing of its spending. Budgets cover the planned use of men, materials, external resources and management effort that is expected to be sufficient to hit the targets. Once the budget is finalised it becomes a tool to feedback how the actual progress is going compared to what was expected. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Tracking Belts on Bucket Elevators and Short Belt Conveyors

Tracking Belts on Bucket Elevators and Short Belt Conveyors

Tracking belts on bucket elevators and short belt conveyors. Flexible, flat belts are used on bucket elevators and belt conveyors to carry loose, bulk product. The belt is stretched tight from head drum to tail drum and the friction generated on the turning head drum is used to drive the belt and carry the product. The belt must run true on the end pulleys (drums) and stay within the sides of the equipment structure. If the belt runs off the drums, buckets will be destroyed and belt edges frayed. In the worst cases the belt runs off the pulleys resulting in a breakdown repair. Proper and long- lived tracking of belts is critical for trouble-free operation. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Dust Bag Selection for Bag-Houses

Dust Bag Selection for Bag-Houses

Bag house dust bag selection. The dust bags within a bag house must handle the process conditions they experience. The choice of bag materials is usually based on the cheapest fabric that will handle the conditions for a minimum of 3 to 5 years’ operation. The selection of the bag materials requires a good understanding of the process temperature, moisture content, chemical reactions with the bag fibre, dust loading effects and behaviour of the dust bags in operation. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Membrane and Leaf Filtration Overview

Membrane and Leaf Filtration Overview

One method to clean particles from a liquid or gas is to pass it through a filter. The filter is a screen that traps and holds the contaminants on its surface while allowing the fluid to twist its way past the build-up and screen. The screen can be used until the back- pressure from the collected contaminants choke it so severely that the fluid flow falls drastically. At that point the screen must be cleaned. This article explains how membrane and leaf filtration processes work and the critical factors that produce successful filtration results. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Mechanical Level Sensor Types and Use

Mechanical Level Sensor Types and Use

In some process situations, mechanical level sensors are the best choice for the environment or are stipulated by law (as in boilers). To operate these devices requires the physical contact of the process being measured. They provide solid indisputable proof that a process condition has been achieved. Provided the mechanical mechanism is connected and working properly, these devices provide the most believable proof that a level in a vessel, tank or silo is actually what the instrument is saying it is. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

The 9 Great Benefits of a CMMS*

The 9 Great Benefits of a CMMS*

A computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) is the maintenance department’s most important tool. It provides insight into the behaviour of the facility’s individual assets, i.e. the plant and equipment. For a CMMS to be of use it must be used as an information ‘bank’ that can be investigated. There are 9 really good reasons to use a CMMS. And each one of them alone makes a CMMS worth having. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

Lubrication Cleanliness & Filtration

Lubrication Cleanliness & Filtration

When oil in gearboxes become contaminated there is a rapid loss of bearing operating life. It is critical that metal particles, dirt, sand, oxidisation products, etc be removed from the oil before they gouge and tear-up the finely toleranced machine parts. Oil replacement, contamination prevention and oil filtration are common practices religiously adopted by the best in the equipment reliability management business. This article explains the fine requirements for successful contamination control to insure long trouble- free equipment life. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini 1 Comment

Fired Packaged Boiler Basics

Fired Packaged Boiler Basics

Steam boilers not used for power generation and of smaller size and energy output are termed packaged boilers. The heat source is usually either electric coils or a burning fuel. When a flame is used to heat the water it is known as a fired packaged boiler. Fired boilers are considered efficient steam generators with about 85% of the available energy converted to steam. They can be of water-tube or fire-tube design. Boilers incorporate many key aspects of heat transfer to create steam from water. This article describes how fired boilers work and their key components. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

by Mike Sondalini Leave a Comment

Heat Transfer Basics

Heat Transfer Basics

Heat is energy and its nature is to flow from a state of high excitement to one of low excitement. Heat is transferred from a hot place to a cold place by convection, conduction or radiation. This article explains the three modes of heat transfer and provides simple examples of each. Methods to reduce and increase heat transfer are also presented. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Maintenance Reliability, Plant Maintenance

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