Wear protection cuts maintenance costs, argues Kingfisher
1 min read
According to a sector specialist, wear protection – the process of coating or lining process plant and equipment, such as cyclones, valves, bunkers, pipework, chutes, etc, with ceramics, metallics or polymers to extend their life – is under-employed in the UK. This is resulting in unnecessary maintenance costs and lost industrial production time running into millions of pounds a year.
Kingfisher, a specialist in wear protection, says that at the heart of this problem are the conflicting demands of reducing capital projects costs verses the needs and expectations of maintenance managers and engineers, who inherit the plant after the usual 12- month warranty has expired. In many instances, says Kingfisher, the OEM has to achieve lowest installed cost for new equipment, in order to comply with project costs, while the maintenance manager is looking for minimised whole life costs from improved equipment reliability and longer operating life.
The company has calculated that, on average, users of its wear protection systems benefit by a factor of five times their initial outlay, with many installations providing wear life of up to 20 years following appropriate wear treatment.
Using a typical example of an enclosed pipework system for conveying bulk materials, the thrust of the argument is that with wear protection, the system user has little or no maintenance requirements over its lifetime thus eliminating the ongoing cost problem – say every four years – of breaking the pipework system down and interrupting production in the process. As a result, argues Kingfisher, the system user benefits from continuous operational gains which defray the cost of the protection system.
