Case Study: Quick Turnaround Time

During a routine customer visit, a sales representative for the Santa Fe Springs Service Center was called upon to help recondition a high-speed gear drive at a major refinery located in the West Coast Region. The old gearbox was attached to a compressor that was being used to pressurize and transport a feedstock that was the byproduct of the refining process. The repair was the result of a planned outage that was originally scheduled to fix a faulty compressor, but with no spares available and a noisy gearbox that was in service since 1960, plant personnel decided to include the gear drive as part of the overhaul project.

The gearbox was a mission-critical piece of equipment that helped the refinery to process over 250,000 barrels of crude oil per day. The refinery is one of the largest and oldest on the West Coast, and has thousands of miles of pipelines and several hundred large storage tanks that can hold up to 15 million barrels of crude. Due to its size and production capacity, an unplanned outage for the plant would result in a loss of over $100,000 per hour, so the refinery required a guarantee that the project could be turned around within their scheduled outage – a two week window – which was four weeks shorter than the industry standard.

The unit was shipped to the West Coast Region’s manufacturing and technical center in Santa Fe Springs, California. The team disassembled the unit and replaced all bearings, seals, thrust washers, lubrication components and hardware, as well as reconditioned the gearing and sandblasted and repainted the housing. The gears were refurbished by kiss grinding them on one of the facility’s high-precision grinding machines, which removed a thin layer of material to restore the surface finish and reclaim the geometry of the gearing.

In addition, by leveraging their engineering expertise and reverse engineering capabilities, the facility was able to manufacture extra bearings, gearing, shafting and thrust washers for the refinery, giving them the ability to stock spares in the event of an emergency and have access to a regular supplier for parts they no longer could obtain from the original manufacturer.

Only two weeks after receiving the damaged gearbox, the service center shipped the reconditioned drive, including an inventory of spare parts to the customer on-time. When the refinery installed the gearbox, they commented on how silently it ran. It turns out that the gears in the original drive ran so loudly that they built a sound isolation box to fit over the housing to contain the noise. Under full load, the repaired gearbox ran so quietly that they were able to remove the fixture and reclaim the wasted floor space.

For more information, call 1.800.766.5120, fax 610.337.5637, or visit us online at www.philagear.com.

CONTACT US . COMPANY OVERVIEW . INDUSTRIES SERVED . REGIONAL FACILITIES . PRODUCTS & SERVICES

Timken® and Philadelphia Gear® are registered trademarks of the The Timken Company or its affiliates.

Click Here for Printable Version of this Newsletter