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Carter Environmental Engineers recently completed installation of five Carter-Midac AS820 Autosludge wet dust collectors at the West London Waste household refuse facility in Brentford, Middlesex. Ensuring clean working conditions for operatives and refuse vehicle drivers, they replace the five original CEE dust collectors which had been in operation at the depot since its opening in 1977.
 
    The five units remove airborne dust from ten tipping bays at West London Waste, whose refuse vehicles bring in around 850 tonnes of household waste daily from the London boroughs of Ealing, Hounslow and Richmond. After compaction, the waste is transferred by rail from the depot to landfill. 

    The units, like CEE's Cyclovent which can be specified for a similar task, are extremely simple in design, requiring no expensive specialist components or control equipment, ensuring minimum maintenance.  They have a long-established track record in many industrial sectors.

A large proportion of gearboxes in the UK food and drink industry are helical worm units, with average efficiencies of around 75%.  Retro-installing Flender helical bevel geared motors, with their typical efficiencies of 96%, provides efficiency improvements of up to 28%, according to Siemens Automation & Drives.

Significant energy savings were made at a large Midlands brewery, thanks to the installation of Flender Motox helical bevel geared motors.  The brewery

Article written by Torbjörn Idhammar  VP and Partner, IDCON, Inc., a maintenance management consulting and training company.Further information is available by contacting This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Visiting plants in different corners of the world, we often are asked:

Article written by Christer Idhammar  President, IDCON, Inc., a maintenance management consulting and training company.Further information is available by contacting This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Most maintenance organizations are overstaffed, not necessarily with own staff, but they use more total maintenance hours than necessary. Total maintenance hours include your own internal hours, overtime hours and contractor hours. As an example a newsprint mill making 500,000 tons recycled paper per year is very good at less than 0.3 total maintenance hours per ton while most operations we have been working with are using over 0.5 total maintenance hours per ton.

If you work in a highly reactive maintenance organization you will be trapped in a circle of despair and you are wasting too much time on doing the wrong things. A circle of despair is when you have to react to a problem on a short notice. You then have to correct the problem as fast as possible; the quality of the correction will then be less than perfect. This leads to that it soon has to be repaired again and this circle of despair will continue and absorb all time you could have used to do the right things.

The FAG range of split spherical roller bearings from Schaeffler UK, not only helps heavy industries such as metals production, paper and pulp manufacturing, mining, quarrying and cement companies reduce production downtime, but also simplifies mounting and helps reduce assembly and maintenance costs. 

Replacing or removing damaged or worn parts on heavy machinery and equipment that requires regular servicing or maintenance, can be a real headache for manufacturing companies, particularly those in the mining, quarrying and mineral processing sector, where the value of capital equipment and production machinery is normally high.

Repair and overhaul of components soaks up valuable time and resources, often resulting in costly production downtime, while the equipment or machinery is offline being repaired. The harsh operating environment may also result in more regular maintenance and overhaul being required on machinery.

Easy-Laser

Oil-free condensates and condensates from gas compressors are normally highly aggressive. However, they cannot attack the Bekomat 13 CO PN 40. The excellent corrosion resistance of the device is due to a 50 micron hard coating, which gives a ceramic structure to the surface of its aluminium housing.

The Bekomat 13 CO PN 40 condensate drain is designed for application with compressors up to 30 m

If you want to change your current maintenance reality, you must begin with the basics. One of the cornerstones of a successful maintenance effort is the precise execution of thoughtful, well-written preventive maintenance (PM) procedures. There are several steps that must be followed to ensure that these procedures are as effective as possible.

Step #1: Assessment The first step in the development of an effective PM procedure is to determine the condition of the machine or machine center. You have to know where you are before you can decide where you want to go and how you intend to get there. If the machine is newer equipment, this evaluation should be fairly straightforward. If, however, you are dealing with equipment that has been in service for a period of time or has a history of unreliability, this assessment could be quite a lengthy undertaking. Still, it

Corus Process Engineering (CPE), part of Corus Northern Engineering Services (CNES), has completed a detailed study into the conversion of a water-only cooling system on a steel slab caster in Mexico, into an air mist spray cooling system, enabling the plant to produce higher quality grades of steel, while providing a more efficient cooling method.

The work is being carried out on the number 3 slab caster at Altos Hornos

By carrying out regular condition monitoring checks on critical rotating plant and machinery, Corus Northern Engineering Services (CNES), the maintenance, condition monitoring and engineering services company within Corus Group, has helped a limestone quarry in Cumbria maintain its output, efficiency and profitability.

CNES