Technical Publication Protect Your Pump and Keep it Longer By Don Lundberg, Sr. Engineer, Fluid Components International

Tech Article Protect Your Pump and Keep It Longer By Don Lundberg, Sr Engineer Fluid Components International In today’s complex and frequently rugged process plant environments, liquid pumps are often over-worked and under-protected from adverse operating conditions. Many pumps run nearly non-stop 24-hours a day over multiple shifts. Poor operating conditions can reduce pump performance, require extra maintenance, shorten their lives and increase costs. Unexpectedly losing a pump is often an expensive or even a dangerous problem in a chemical plant. The results of a pump failure potentially...

Among the many types of point flow/level switches available is FCI’s FlexSwitch® FLT Series, which offers dual alarm capability (Fig 2). Fig 2. Flow Switch Alarm 1 will detect a low-flow situation anywhere between 0.01 and 3 feet per second (FPS) (.003 to.9 meters per second MPS). This low flow alarm can be regarded as a pre-warning signal for the control system or operator. The system or operator can then decide to keep the pump running or to shut it down. Alarm 2 occurs if the feed line to the pump is running dry, which would be an emergency signal to shut down the pump immediately because...

The elbow flow conditioner’s profile conditioning tabs produce rapid crossstream mixing, forcing higher velocity regions to mix with lower velocity regions. The shape of the resultant velocity profile is “flat” and repeatable regardless of the closecoupled upstream flow disturbances. Incorporating anti-swirl mechanisms into the design eliminates swirl typically seen exiting 90-degree elbows. The result is a flow stream that enters the pump in such a way that it maximizes the efficiency of its operation and reduces stress. In addition, the tapered design of the anti-swirl and profile conditioning...