Handling High Pressure

April 2, 2018

About the author:

Tom West is regional sales manager for Wanner Engineering. He can be reached at 612-332-5681 or [email protected].

Based near Pittsburgh, Pa., Atlantis Technologies provides water treatment companies with custom engineered and manufactured chemical feed equipment. Its experience and background create functional, durable and reliable equipment for the specialty chemical market.

For the paper industry, Atlantis has developed chemical feeds systems that use pumps to deliver chemicals into spray bars, which are used to clean the paper machine screens. This type of application requires high-pressure, hot water. Many facilities add caustic or some type of cleaning solution to the stream to speed up the cleaning process; however, finding a pump durable enough to handle the high pressure is no easy task.

“In the early days, there were serious issues with pumping solutions at the pressures required for cleaning the screens,” said David Descutner, president of Atlantis Technologies. “Most pumps out there just couldn’t handle it.”

Descutner first ran into the problem at an Alabama paper plant. The plant needed to push caustic chemicals against 400 psi on the spray bars. “It was just tearing up the pumps,” he said. “Both the high pressures and the cleaning solution. It was so hard on the pumps that the plant was rebuilding them every six months.”

Descutner decided to test out a new pump called the Hydra-Cell at the plant. “I was impressed by how well these new pumps handled high pressure and corrosive materials,” he said. “Upon installation at the plant, the problems were eliminated; no more having to rebuild the pumps.”

With the success at the paper plant in Alabama, Descutner found other uses for the pumps. “In using the Hydra-Cell pumps, we also discovered additional applications in which the pumps would offer intrinsic benefits to the end user, namely our polymer feed equipment products,” he said.

Descutner said the pumps offer an insurance policy for applications where there is an opportunity to run a pump dry. “The Hydra-Cell pump provides a near continuous feed of polymer and is easy and inexpensive to maintain.”

“It’s the seal-less design of the Hydra-Cell pump that really distinguish it from other pumps and is the basis of its long service-life. Most pumps can’t perform under such high pressures with such corrosive elements,” Descutner said. “However, the Hydra-Cell pumps, with their ability to perform at a linear rate over a wide pressure range and their ability to run dry, made them an easy choice to carry over to our other systems.”

Hydra-Cell pumps are built to exceed API 675 performance standards. Other benefits include low pulsation, energy-savings, a compact design and the ability to operate at pressures ranging from less than 1 bar to at least 70 bar.

For more information on Emulsion Polymer Systems from Atlantis Technologies, LLC, visit http://www.atlantisllc.com. For more information on Hydra-Cell pumps from Wanner Engineering, visit http://www.hydra-cell.com.

About the Author

Tom West

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