Wear of liners: Prevention and PM's

Keiron Arndell · 18th October 2018, 8:30

We have a plant that discharges approximately 1 million tonnes of grain, soya and wheat (UK Based). We have an ongoing issue of chuting wearing through and becoming holed.

We have tried replacing worn chutes and similarly installing liners over the chutes. Used plastic, mild steel, hardened 400 steel and now 500. They continue to wear.

Has anyone a suggestion for:

1. Better materials that can be used for this purpose? They are typically square chutes.
2. A way of catching worn liners before they become holed i.e. a preventative maintenance suggestion that can help spot significant wear. (The plant has 33 conveyors - large site to visually check them all often).

Thank you in advance.

John Gateley · 21st October 2018, 8:50

If you are getting high wear with wheat & soy beans then your whole plant should be examined.
What are your belt speeds. Are your discharge trajectories OK? Thirty three belts required a competent specialist's input. Was this available. Its too late now & you will just have to live with it.
Rectification cost for a grain import terminal would be high because of the need to maintain your inbye capability. It is cheaper to live with your situation & recommend that your management improve their contractor selection procedure.

Keiron Arndell · 22nd October 2018, 8:11

Originally Posted by johngateley

If you are getting high wear with wheat & soy beans then your whole plant should be examined.
What are your belt speeds. Are your discharge trajectories OK? Thirty three belts required a competent specialist's input. Was this available. Its too late now & you will just have to live with it.
Rectification cost for a grain import terminal would be high because of the need to maintain your inbye capability. It is cheaper to live with your situation & recommend that your management improve their contractor selection procedure.

Thanks for your response John, I totally agree with you that the initial design could well be a large problem with the wear, it was designed and build several decades ago.

Gary Blenkhorn · 22nd October 2018, 20:10

You should have someone take a serious look at the chute designs themselves. Many wear problems can be corrected with proper chute design through material flow analysis. Much cheaper than trial and error.

At a salt mine where I worked (9 million tons per year) we had what we thought was wear until we went with a 316 stainless steel liner or replaced the chute with 316 stainless and the problem went away. What we discovered was that we had more of a corrosion / erosion issue. Meaning the chute would start to rust and then the rust would be removed during the loading cycles. Repeating this process over and over again created loss of material over a short period of time. The higher the moisture area the greater the problem was.

We started replacing chutes with stainless steel and the problem almost completely went away as the life of the chutes increased dramatically.

Keiron Arndell · 23rd October 2018, 13:16

Thank you both for your guidance. Flow analysis may be a step in preventing future wear. It may have to be something we look into and use it to help assist us, I would have to do some research on it however to see how it functions and what it finds. But thank you.

John Gateley · 23rd October 2018, 13:49

Nothing lasts forever: I certainly hope not.
Why spend time & money to tart up an old girl who has done plenty of business. (do I sound like a real Scouser?)
Your plant is surely on its last legs but still working. If you pull things apart in old age they might collapse unexpectedly.
I am now even more convinced that it would be better to live with the wear issue. Suppose the newer, better, cleverer chutes & liners last longer but something else falls apart. Then you are left with good liners & a broken down plant.

**SKurtenbach** · 4th January 2019, 14:06

Originally Posted by keironarndell

We have a plant that discharges approximately 1 million tonnes of grain, soya and wheat (UK Based). We have an ongoing issue of chuting wearing through and becoming holed.

We have tried replacing worn chutes and similarly installing liners over the chutes. Used plastic, mild steel, hardened 400 steel and now 500. They continue to wear.

Has anyone a suggestion for:

1. Better materials that can be used for this purpose? They are typically square chutes.
2. A way of catching worn liners before they become holed i.e. a preventative maintenance suggestion that can help spot significant wear. (The plant has 33 conveyors - large site to visually check them all often).

Thank you in advance.

Hello Keiron,

Kalenborn has numerous places working with our wear resistant linings. Big oversea ports for example, handling tons and tons of different types of grain (and materials a lot more abrasive than that). Companies like B?hler, Coperion, Neuero, they all rely on our materials and customized systems.

You can write me an email on stefan.kurtenbach@kalenborn.com. To start talking about the specifics of your Problem. To see if we need to do something on the Engineering. But pretty sure most of it should be +/- ok. And pretty sure we find a common approach to longer the lifetime of your equipment considerably.

Looking Forward to hear from you.

Best regards

Stefan Kurtenbach
Kalenborn Kalprotect GmbH & Co. KG

PS:
No more falling liners, don't worry. One inspection per year to see everything still is working fine, somethingt like that...

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