The Challenge:
The customer, a household waste disposal company, was using a competitor’s oval door joints on steam drum access doors with temperatures of 280 degrees C and 18 bar working pressure. These joints would periodically fail causing steam leaks which required costly shut down of the plant while they were being replaced.
The Solution:
XMEK engineers reviewed the customers application and proposed a new solution to alleviate the problem. The solution entailed replacing their current seals with a premium graphite gasket designed by the XMEK team. The customer replaced the failing product with an XMEK premium 2mm Novaphit SSTC graphite gaskets.
The Results:
The customer was impressed with the level of technical support delivered by XMEK engineers and application specialists as well as their ability to quickly and effectively develop a superior solution to solve their problem. Since switching to the new XMEK gasket, the problem joints have all but eliminated unplanned plant shut down due to steam leaks and are only replaced at scheduled maintenance intervals. The SSTC gaskets are comparable pricewise with the failing product, but massive savings have been made in the reduction of downtime. The end result was the customer was able to significantly reduce the amount of unplanned downtime caused by the previous products high failure rate, saving them both time and money.
Application / Products:
- Graphite gaskets
