To meet EPA air pollution standards for sulfur dioxide emissions, Montgomery County’s North Incinerator plant injects finely powdered limestone into the three incinerator units housed at the facility. Long-radius stainless steel sweep elbows conveyed approximately 18,000 pounds of the material through the company’s dense phase pneumatic conveying system daily. The problem? Lime is incredibly abrasive and those elbows — critical components of the conveying system — were literally being worn away.

Four years. That’s how long it’s been since Tom Sorensen, maintenance manager at Carbo Ceramics’ Eufaula, Ala. facility, has had to replace even a single elbow in his pneumatic conveying lines since making the switch to the Smart Elbow® deflection elbow by Hammertek.

It turns out that even ordinary wood particles can become highly abrasive when moving at a high volume and pressure. At Northwood Pulp and Timber Ltd, in Prince George, British Columbia, wear-back sweep elbows were wearing out at an alarming rate (approximately every three months), thanks in part to the “hog fuel” mixture of bark and sawdust pneumatically conveyed through the plant’s system.

A maker of oat cereal and oat flour, National Oats (a subsidiary of Curtice Burns, Inc.) uses a pneumatic conveyance system to move raw oats from their outdoor storage tanks to blending vessels housed inside the plant at a rate of 90,000 lbs/hour through an 8” pipeline. The volume of material moving through the system was taking its toll on the wear-back ceramic sweep elbows. These sweep elbows required periodic repair and replacement — which …

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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.

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …