Skip to content
HammerTek Corporation
  • Elbow Room
  • Back to HammerTek.com

HammerTek Elbow Room

SMART ELBOW® Deflection Elbow for Pneumatic Conveying Systemsress site

Category: Case Study

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow keeps power plant leak free

January 16, 2015 by Miaja Cornelius

In order to meet federal sulfur dioxide emissions standards, PECO Energy Company’s Eddystone plant employs a scrubbing process using magnesium oxide (MgO) pneumatically conveyed from storage silos to a mixer before being sprayed into the plant’s exhaust stacks. The MgO must be fully operational whenever the coal-fired plant is generating electricity to keep sulfur dioxide emissions below mandated levels. Elbow failure is not an option.

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbows stand up to the most abrasive polymers

December 17, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

Worn-out elbows — and the problems associated with them — are a fact of life in industrial environments. Most elbows wear out and have to be repaired and replaced frequently (sometimes as often as every 90 days in high-wear applications conveying abrasive material), costing production lines a heavy price in time, equipment and materials. That’s what Gary Wright, Director of Plant Engineering at RheTech, always assumed to be true. Until he discovered the Smart Elbow …

Continue Reading

Hammerloy™ Series Smart Elbow® deflection elbow a perfect fit

December 1, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

Blowouts aren’t just costly due to lost productivity and extensive cleanup; they often carry substantial health risks and safety concerns from spilled material and environmental conditions. This was certainly the case with the Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority (UOSA). The wastewater treatment plant handles upwards of 30 million gallons per day and provides potable water to more than 300,000 people in portions of Fairfax and Prince William counties in northern Virginia. Its chemical treatment system relies …

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow saves space, money and barley

November 17, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

Space is often at a premium in commercial breweries. Raw ingredients, fermentation vessels, and other brewery equipment have large footprints. Engineers and plant managers are always looking at ways to maximize efficiencies without crowding out existing equipment and personnel. Roy Marin, staff engineer at the Miller Brewing Co. plant in Fort Worth, Texas, found himself in just such a situation.

Continue Reading

Clog-free Smart Elbow® deflection elbow eliminates down time

November 3, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

When materials clog in pneumatic conveyor systems, manufacturers feel the pinch. Line shutdowns are costly and result in lost productivity and missed production schedules. They’re a headache too many manufacturers assumed were unavoidable. The best a manufacturer of loose, abrasive material could hope for infrequent clogs which could be cleared quickly without significantly impacting productivity. Fiberglas Canada used to think this way, until they installed Hammertek’s Smart Elbow deflection elbow on their pneumatic conveyor system.

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbows win the losing battles

October 15, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

A key ingredient in industrial and commercial flooring products, silica aggregate is incredibly abrasive. Manufacturers like Stonhard are fighting a losing battle in their pneumatic systems, replacing costly ceramic pipe elbows far too often. Their ceramic elbows, vital for moving the aggregate through the pneumatic lines, were literally being worn away by the fast moving material. According to Greg Sosenheimer, plant manager at Stonhard’s Fort Wayne, IN, plant, 82,000 pounds of the coarse and abrasive …

Continue Reading

Putting the Smart Elbow® deflection elbow into context

October 1, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

One of the things we’ve always tried to demonstrate on this blog is how the Smart Elbow deflection elbow saves space, time and money. We’ve highlighted companies dealing with plastics, abrasives, grain, wood pulp, power and wastewater through a series of case studies addressing maintenance issues, operational inefficiencies, mitigation of material costs, and flow control, to name just a few. They all had one thing in common: their conveyor systems were all improved significantly through …

Continue Reading

Inspiration from industrial problem-solving

August 13, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

In case after case, we have shown that replacing worn sweep elbows in pneumatic, liquid, slurry and steam conveying lines with HammerTek’s revolutionary Smart Elbow® deflection elbows eliminated frequent leaks and their costs in product loss, repair and replacement, production line downtime and product and facility contamination. In case after case, HammerTek Smart Elbow units have prevented exposure to OSHA and EPA compliance risk.

Continue Reading

Become a believer!

June 16, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

Engineers at Alexandria Sanitation Authority’s municipal wastewater treatment facility, a sprawling plant that treats more than 80 million gallons of wastewater a day from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., had had enough troubles with lime spills. It was the mid-1990s and the plant was new and state-of-the-art, but the lime — which is carried in pelletized form through two four-inch pneumatic lines from truck to silo and used for pH control — kept wearing …

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow keeps abrasives in line

May 21, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

Abrasive materials are, well, abrasive — whether they’re being used in their intended manner or passing through pipelines in the plant where they’re produced. So what do you do when these materials are causing constant pipeline problems in the manufacturing process? You can’t stop the abrasive from being abrasive, so you have to look elsewhere — and that’s exactly what engineers at Chromalloy’s Drilling Division had to do.

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow part of the diet at Quaker

May 5, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

As faithfully as an old hound, pneumatic pipe elbows were wearing out at the Pet Foods Division of Quaker Oats in Rockford, Illinois. Time after time — every three months, on average — the stainless steel elbows in the lines carrying grain from the plant’s storage areas to receiving tanks were wearing out. Quaker had been using conventional, long-radius sweep elbows in these lines. But the constant ruptures, resulting in clouds of grain dust, line …

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow the ‘Missing Link’ in State-of-the-Art Conveyance System

April 15, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

Rennselaer Plastics Co. has learned the easy way that sometimes it’s good to go by your elbow when you need a new rule of thumb. The Rennselaer, Indiana company, which produces PVC piping products for the plumbing trade, utilizes a pneumatic conveying system to transfer plastic resin beads and pellets from outdoor storage hoppers to its pipe extruders. While the company had the whole process state-of-the-art and finely tuned, there was one area that left …

Continue Reading

Cement dust no match for Smart Elbow® deflection elbow

April 1, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

If you’ve read other posts in this blog, you’ve undoubtedly picked up on the fact that HammerTek’s Smart Elbow deflection elbow is the answer for industrial applications requiring the movement of abrasive product pneumatically from one place to another. Just in case you haven’t, or you need one more reason before picking up that phone, this case study is for you. Essroc Materials Inc. had the whole cement manufacturing process set in stone save one …

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow keeps the chips in play at Northwood

March 14, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

As time goes by, HammerTek’s patented Smart Elbow deflection elbow is proving that it can move your product through bends in pneumatic conveying lines — no matter the product. In Prince George, British Columbia, Northwood Pulp and Timber Ltd. has applied the Smart Elbow deflection elbow to successfully remedy a problem common to the pulp and paper industry: moving wood chips, bark and sawdust — known in the industry as hog fuel — while eliminating …

Continue Reading

Cost-effective, compact, convenient and durable: Smart Elbow® deflection elbow shows measurable improvements at National Oats

March 4, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

Smart Elbow deflection elbows may be known for their ability to handle changes in pipeline direction with much less wear, tear and maintenance than traditional sweep elbows, but many of our customers are reporting additional benefits. Take, for example, National Oats. The Cedar Rapids, IA, plant has been processing oat cereal and flour for decades. Prior to 1985, conveyance of these materials from outdoor storage tanks to indoor blending vessels was handled the traditional way, …

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow keeps environment clean

February 4, 2014 by Miaja Cornelius

There’s something odd about an industry that’s designed to be good for the environment having environmental concerns of its own. Yet that’s just what was happening at Montgomery County’s North Incinerator plant, which converts household waste to energy in the Dayton, Ohio, area. Try as they did, engineers could not find a way to convey powdered lime — part of the plant’s phase pneumatic conveying system — for any great length of time before a …

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow engineered for PVC

December 17, 2013 by Miaja Cornelius

A customer of ours — a PVC pipe producer with $40 million in annual sales — uses a pneumatic conveying system to transfer resin and pellets from storage to the pipe extruders. The abrasive nature of their product was causing elbow wear — and serious down time — every couple of months. Another customer producing vinyl windows and extrusions experienced elbow failure &mash; along with expensive down time and EPA fines — every couple of …

Continue Reading

Hammertek “brews” a solution for Miller

August 15, 2013 by Miaja Cornelius

When Miller Brewing Company’s Fort Worth, TX facility needed to make a change in its conveying system, HammerTek and its patented Smart Elbow® deflection elbow proved the right recipe for the job. Roy Marin, staff engineer at the facility, needed to replace a worn-out automatic diverter that switched its rail car unload line from one storage silo to another. This diverter had been a source of maintenance and housekeeping problems, and Marin wanted to replace …

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow eliminates cleanup, regulatory costs at PECO Energy

August 1, 2013 by Miaja Cornelius

The Engineers at PECO Energy Company’s Eddystone Generating Plant near Philadelphia had a problem on their hands: The scrubbing process line responsible for meeting Federal emissions standards was failing on a regular basis, causing costly cleanup, environmental and regulatory concerns. The plant utilizes a magnesium oxide-based scrubbing process to remove sulfur dioxide — a component in acid rain — from the coal-fired plant’s exhaust. Magnesium oxide powder is conveyed pneumatically from storage silos to a …

Continue Reading

Smart Elbow® deflection elbow solves slippery sewerage situation

July 15, 2013 by Miaja Cornelius

Robert Forgione was tired of slipping and sliding his way through another pile of dry pebble line and dust, half-blinded by the cloud it had created as it spewed from a failed conveying line elbow at the Upper Occoquan Water Reclamation Plant in Centreville, Virginia. The half-inch hole created by the mere passage of lime powder through a bend in a line, called a sweep elbow in the industry, had blown the fine powder all …

Continue Reading

Posts navigation

  • Previous
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Next

Contact Us

HammerTek Corporation
2400 Emrick Boulevard
Bethlehem, PA 18020
Phone: 1-800-505-9665 or (610) 814-2273
Fax: (610) 814-0600
sales@hammertek.com
www.hammertek.com

About HammerTek

HammerTek is the inventor and manufacturer of the Smart Elbow® deflection elbow. Having recognized a need for extremely wear resistant and space efficient elbows, the designers created a revolutionary elbow that operates by deflection.

The Smart Elbow® design is a breakthrough in pneumatic and slurry conveying. Elbow wear, surging, product damage, plugging, and continual downtime are now nuisances of the past.

© 2022 HammerTek Elbow Room | WordPress Theme by Superbthemes