HammerTek Product Opens New Window for Plastics Manufacturer

In an environment where product mixture is critical and rapidly failing sweep elbows were causing expensive downtime and EPA fines, Al Husni had to do something.

Husni is maintenance manager at ACRO Extrusion Corporation, a Wilmington, DE plant that produces vinyl window systems and extrusions. PVC resin runs from ACRO’s outdoor silos to the plant’s mixing room at a rate of as much as 34,000 pounds per day, and the abrasive product was causing the system’s sweep elbows to fail as often as every two to three weeks. Cleanup and repair was time-consuming and expensive, and any material released to the air or the ground required documentation and was subject to federal fines.

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Smart Elbow Puts an End to Failures, Cleanups

Frequent shutdowns weren’t the only inconvenience caused by failing sweep elbows at Montgomery County’s North Incinerator plant. They also created a cleanup nightmare every time the finely powdered limestone they were conveying exploded into the air like so much talcum powder.

The plant, which serves the Dayton area, also faced hefty downtime expenses if it stayed shut down too long, Plant Manager Dave Martin said.

Powdered limestone must be injected into the plant’s three incinerators to meet EPA air pollution control standards for sulfur dioxide emissions. The pneumatic conveying system used in this process contained long-radius sweep elbows. But these elbows proved unable to withstand the lime’s abrasive action.

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Smart Elbow Passes the Barite When All Else Fails

HammerTek’s Smart Elbow handles a hopeless situation like just another day on the job.

Chromalloy’s Drilling Division produces ground barite (barium sulfate) at a plant in Houston, Texas. Barite is an abrasive material that was causing premature wear and plugging problems with the conventional elbows being used to transport it pneumatically from the plant’s grinding mills to its storage tanks.

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Going With the Flow Instead of Against the Grain

HammerTek’s Smart Elbows work so well because they don’t allow product to impact and erode their walls. No matter the product – from highly abrasive crushed granite to seemingly harmless sawdust – all have the ability, under high speed and pressure, to erode sweep elbows.

Time and again, the stainless steel elbows in the pneumatic conveying systems at the Pet Foods Division of Quaker Oats in Rockbridge, Ill., were wearing out prematurely – sometimes in less than three months.

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HammerTek Product Cures “Achilles Elbow”

A company that produces pipe was having some troubles of its own before HammerTek’s Smart Elbow solved their problem.

Rensselaer Plastics Co. of Rensselaer, Ind., produces PVC piping products for the plumbing trade, with annual sales in the $40 million range. One process at the plant uses a pneumatic conveying system to transfer resin and pellets from storage hoppers to pipe extruders, and therein lay the plant’s Achilles Heel.

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Smart Elbow Solution to Cement Dust Woes

Like many other industries that need to move abrasive product through pneumatic lines, Essroc Materials Inc. has solved a lot of its plugging and wear headaches with HammerTek’s Smart Elbow technology.

Essroc, formerly Coplay Cement, is a wet-process cement plant in Frederick, Md., that produces 350,000 to 400,000 tons of cement annually using two 400-foot rotary cement kilns.

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Smart Elbow Moves the Bark, Avoids the Bite

Mario Rezendes had a problem – until he discovered HammerTek’s Smart Elbow.

Rezendes, maintenance supervisor at Northwood Pulp and Timber Ltd. in Prince George, British Columbia, was facing a problem common in the pulp and paper industry: Moving product through bends in pneumatic lines where friction causes failure, leaks and downtime.

Wood products – in Northwood’s case, “hog fuel” (bark and sawdust) – can become highly abrasive when pneumatically conveyed. At Northwood, wear-back sweep elbows in the plant’s 12-inch diameter hog fuel conveying line were wearing out every three months, requiring repair, cleanup work and associated expenses at a frequency that was far from satisfactory.

Rezendes had heard about HammerTek’s Smart Elbow and decided to give it a try. He fitted a Smart Elbow at one location in the line’s three-elbow system. The Smart Elbow is designed to convey direction through deflection instead of impact with elbow walls, resulting in smoother flow and elimination of elbow wear. Sure enough, this design provided the solution to the problem.

Rezendes’ original Smart Elbow lasted four years – some 16 times longer than the wear-back sweep elbow it replaced. Based on this performance, he replaced the other two elbows in the line with Smart Elbows. This modification proved so successful that the plant is now specifying the installation of three 10-inch Smart Elbows in its chip handling system.

 

To read the full case study, please visit the HammerTek website.

Granite Dust? Rock ‘n Roll for the Smart Elbow

HammerTek’s patented Smart Elbow has proven itself as the smart solution for abrasive issues in pneumatic lines conveying products like oats, lime and wood particulates. But what about an intensely abrasive product like granite dust?

 

Western Paving Corp., a division of Western Mobil, has to move granite dust from one area to another in its manufacturing process. Granite dust from the kiln is collected and pneumatically conveyed to a point where it is combined with oil and returned to the mix. This compound then functions as a binding agent that is essential to the entire operation.

 

The operation’s long-radius sweep elbows, fitted with concrete strongbacks, proved no match for the highly abrasive granite dust, which was wearing these elbows down and causing them to leak hot material within six weeks of installation. Leaks require a rapid shutdown of the 15-ton-per-hour operation for repair, a situation that Western Paving deems unacceptable in terms of waste, downtime and cleanup liabilities.

 

After learning about HammerTek’s Smart Elbow and its method of conveyance by deflection instead of impact, the corporation installed six 90-degree Smart Elbows in place of its concrete-backed sweep elbows. The result? System shutdown due to elbow wear was eliminated because of the Smart Elbow’s unique characteristics.

 

Western Paving initially purchased three Smart Elbows in 1988, followed by another three in 1990. The HammerTek elbows are lasting about five years, as opposed to the six-week lifespan of the original sweeps. This incredible increase in elbow life has prompted Western to specify the phasing in of Smart Elbows in all of its plants as older equipment wears out. Western also reports the added benefit of reduced line pressure on systems equipped with the Smart Elbow.

To read the full case study, please visit the HammerTek website.

Smart Elbows: A “Clean Sweep” for Lime Conveyance Problems

The ability of HammerTek’s patented Smart Elbows to eliminate elbow wear due to abrasive impact and friction has made a major impact on downtime at a high-volume municipal wastewater treatment facility serving the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

As the primary wastewater treatment facility for the city of Alexandria and Fairfax County, Va., the Alexandria Sanitation Authority’s sewage plant operates 24 hours a day with a volume that can exceed 80 million gallons per day. For pH control, the operation uses a half-million pounds of pelletized lime per month, conveyed from trucks to 70-foot silos via twin four-inch lines.

Initially the lines were fitted with four-inch sweep elbows. When the sweeps began leaking after about six months in service, the Authority swapped them for sweeps fitted with wear-backs.

“Then we were probably losing an elbow every nine months,” Lead Mechanic Bob Devereaux said, adding that the resulting dust and downtime was not a good thing for such a high-volume facility.

In early 1998, Devereaux received a postcard from Plant Process Manager Tom Tyler offering a free trial of the HammerTek Smart Elbow. The Authority began replacing sweeps in its lime lines with four-inch HammerLoy Smart Elbows in April, and by June there were five Smart Elbows in service.

Two years later Devereaux pulled a couple of the Smart Elbows out of service and inspected them for wear. Finding none, the Authority continued replacing its old-style sweeps with Smart Elbows, which have consistently resisted any hint of wear. Devereaux says the switch to Smart Elbows has more than paid for itself.

To read the full case study, please visit the HammerTek website.

Schmalbach-Lubeca: No Friction, No Heat, No Problem

One of the benefits of HammerTek’s patented Smart Elbow design is the reduction in friction and heat that results from keeping material from contacting the walls of its pipe elbows.

Getting rid of that friction has done nothing but good for Schmalbach-Lubeca’sBlythewood,South Carolinalocation. One of the company’s 63 plants worldwide producing millions of plastic beverage bottles daily, ­the Blythewood plant was using long-radius elbows to convey PET Poly Pellets from rail car to silo, and from silo to molding.

Traditional elbows change a material’s direction by causing the material to deflect off the inside of the pipe walls. With materials like the pellets used at the beverage plant, this contact is the source of friction, heat, and the unwanted side effects of both.

“When feeling the exterior of the long-radius elbow, the elbow felt hot at the point of impact,” said Thom Iwancio, plant system engineer. After changing over to HammerTek’s product in the same system, “when feeling the Smart Elbow it was cool to the touch.”

Impact-generated heat was causing the product to produce “streamers” inside the pipe that collected on the magnet protection before the molding operation, effectively “choking” off the material flow to the injection molding machines. Once this happened, the system would have to be shut down to clean out the magnet chute, causing loss of production, time and money.

Since changing to Smart Elbows in 1999, the streamers have been eliminated. Operational time has improved, the Smart Elbow changeover has paid for itself, and less material is being found in the system’s dust collection system – a result of the Smart Elbow’s method of deflecting material without impact.

Inside every Smart Elbow is a patented Vortex Chamber, a nearly spherical chamber that allows the formation of a slowly rotating ball of material which, instead of creating eddies or other pockets of turbulence, redirects and smooths the flow of material into its new direction while keeping it from impacting the walls of the chamber. This eliminates elbow wear, helps save energy in pumping costs, and increases product quantity and quality by improving material delivery rate and flow.

To read the complete case study, go to:   http://www.hammertek.com/case-study-plastic-schmalbach.asp    For more information on the HammerTek Smart Elbow, please visit www.hammertek.com.