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 deflection elbow from Hammertek. Pulling a year-old Smart Elbow model to check for damage, he fully expected to see considerable wear. What he found instead astounded him.

“After one year in service, we could still see the casting marks,” said Wright. “By now, we would have been through four or five sweep elbows and 12 rolls of duct tape.”

RheTech, Inc., manufactures proprietary thermoplastic polyolefin alloys and compounds, frequently using additives like minerals and fiberglass as part of the formulation.

The highly abrasive additives, namely fiberglass, were hard on the plant’s long-sweep elbows. Repairing or replacing a sweep elbow would cause costly downtime, which trickled down to customer service. Delivery timelines were being compromised.

To further complicate matters, RheTech’s exterior silos are loaded 24 hours a day. When an elbow failed during the night, it often wasn’t noticed right away.

Elbow failures caused major product spills, line shutdowns, and added costs in parts, labor and lost productivity.

To address these unacceptable failure rates and costs, Wright ordered the installation of 120 tube-size 90° elbows: 70 regular ductile iron and 50 hard ductile iron. Their performance was so tremendous, 50 additional elbows were installed four months later.

Five years later, we checked back with RheTech to see how the Smart Elbow deflection elbows were holding up. None of the 170 Smart Elbow products installed had been replaced since the installation six years earlier. When the company redesigned its Fowlerville, Michigan, plant, engineers specified Smart Elbow models — and have yet to experience a single sweep elbow failure.

To find out how HammerTek Smart Elbow deflection elbows can save your company expensive repairs and downtime, visit us at HammerTek.com.