Martin Sprocket and Gears: Maintenance and Troubleshooting Guide

Maybe you’re thinking to yourself that the waste and inefficiency caused by using worn spray nozzles just can’t be all that significant. If so, it’s time to change your thinking and determine if nozzle wear is a problem in your operations. Like many other processors, you may discover that you are wasting millions of gallons of water, thousands of gallons of chemicals and incurring many other unnecessary costs due to using worn nozzles.

It's important to find out if material flows are present or not throughout a bulk-processing facility; material cost savings and increased plant efficiency can offset an investment in monitoring. Most bulk solids processors can do this using low-cost acoustic emission-monitoring technology.

As the lights flicker and the machines hum, strange noises echo through the factory floor. Are they signs of restless spirits—or just neglected preventive maintenance? This Halloween, step into the wriggling insides of your equipment and uncover the mechanical mysteries behind every eerie creak, rattle, and groan. Sometimes, the scariest sounds aren’t from ghosts…but from failing components.

Spherical roller bearings are popular across industries because they can take very heavy loads and are self-aligning. Their design allows them to take combined loads in both the radial and axial direction acting together.

Cavitation means that cavities are forming in the liquid that we are pumping. When these cavities form at the suction of the pump several things happen all at once. The cavities form for five basic reasons and it is common practice to lump all of them into the general classification of cavitation. This is an error because we will learn that to correct each of these conditions we must understand why they occur and how to fix them.

The affinity laws accurately predict the affect of changing the speed of a centrifugal or rotary pump, and they also do a fairly good job of predicting the affect of changing the diameter of a centrifugal pump. In another paper (02-01) we discussed the affinity laws as they apply to centrifugal pumps, but in this paper we will look at their use with rotary pumps.

The cost of replacement parts, labor, standby inventory, and downtime can have a devastating effect on a plant's bottom line. Eliminating even one of them by drying a compressed air system will offset the cost of installing and operating the equipment. When pneumatic components wear or become corroded as a result of moisture, they consume more compressed air - and lose energy efficiency. When this wear or corrosion becomes great enough, components must be repaired or replaced - increasing operating expense.