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If you’ve ever wanted to see HammerTek’s Smart Elbow deflection elbow up close and personal (including the unique Vortex Chamber) and meet the team responsible for the design and manufacture of this innovative piece of technology, I have just the opportunity for you. HammerTek Corporation will be exhibiting at the Oil Sands Trade Show and Conference September 9-10, 2014 in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. This conference will explore issues of community engagement, sustainable development and environmental technology facing the Canadian oil market. Since 1985, it has brought visionaries and industry leaders together to discuss the newest technologies, processes and manufacturing advancements from the oil sands sector. 460

In case after case, we have shown that replacing worn sweep elbows in pneumatic, liquid, slurry and steam conveying lines with HammerTek’s revolutionary Smart Elbow® deflection elbows eliminated frequent leaks and their costs in product loss, repair and replacement, production line downtime and product and facility contamination. In case after case, HammerTek Smart Elbow units have prevented exposure to OSHA and EPA compliance risk. 448

Regular readers of this blog already know that Hammertek’s Smart Elbow deflection elbow saves space, time and money. The Smart Elbow deflection elbow takes 60% less linear space than long-radius elbow layouts, virtually eliminates elbow replacement costs, improves laminar flow, practically eliminates downtime due to wear, prevents plugging, surging and cross-contamination, and vastly reduces maintenance needs. 438

Engineers at Alexandria Sanitation Authority’s municipal wastewater treatment facility, a sprawling plant that treats more than 80 million gallons of wastewater a day from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., had had enough troubles with lime spills. It was the mid-1990s and the plant was new and state-of-the-art, but the lime — which is carried in pelletized form through two four-inch pneumatic lines from truck to silo and used for pH control — kept wearing through pipe elbows in the line every six months or so. 419

Abrasive materials are, well, abrasive — whether they’re being used in their intended manner or passing through pipelines in the plant where they’re produced. So what do you do when these materials are causing constant pipeline problems in the manufacturing process? You can’t stop the abrasive from being abrasive, so you have to look elsewhere — and that’s exactly what engineers at Chromalloy’s Drilling Division had to do. 413

As faithfully as an old hound, pneumatic pipe elbows were wearing out at the Pet Foods Division of Quaker Oats in Rockford, Illinois. Time after time — every three months, on average — the stainless steel elbows in the lines carrying grain from the plant’s storage areas to receiving tanks were wearing out. Quaker had been using conventional, long-radius sweep elbows in these lines. But the constant ruptures, resulting in clouds of grain dust, line shutdowns and expensive maintenance time — not to mention all those replacement elbows — were getting old. 410

Rennselaer Plastics Co. has learned the easy way that sometimes it’s good to go by your elbow when you need a new rule of thumb. The Rennselaer, Indiana company, which produces PVC piping products for the plumbing trade, utilizes a pneumatic conveying system to transfer plastic resin beads and pellets from outdoor storage hoppers to its pipe extruders. While the company had the whole process state-of-the-art and finely tuned, there was one area that left engineers scratching their heads — and their wallets. 408

If you’ve read other posts in this blog, you’ve undoubtedly picked up on the fact that HammerTek’s Smart Elbow deflection elbow is the answer for industrial applications requiring the movement of abrasive product pneumatically from one place to another. Just in case you haven’t, or you need one more reason before picking up that phone, this case study is for you. Essroc Materials Inc. had the whole cement manufacturing process set in stone save one Achilles heel: moving cement dust produced in the company’s kilns was a constant problem of plugged and surging lines. Once again, the Smart Elbow deflection elbow came to the rescue. 404

As time goes by, HammerTek’s patented Smart Elbow deflection elbow is proving that it can move your product through bends in pneumatic conveying lines — no matter the product. In Prince George, British Columbia, Northwood Pulp and Timber Ltd. has applied the Smart Elbow deflection elbow to successfully remedy a problem common to the pulp and paper industry: moving wood chips, bark and sawdust — known in the industry as hog fuel — while eliminating the damaging effects of this material on the conveying line. 402

Smart Elbow deflection elbows may be known for their ability to handle changes in pipeline direction with much less wear, tear and maintenance than traditional sweep elbows, but many of our customers are reporting additional benefits. Take, for example, National Oats. The Cedar Rapids, IA, plant has been processing oat cereal and flour for decades. Prior to 1985, conveyance of these materials from outdoor storage tanks to indoor blending vessels was handled the traditional way, using an 8-inch pipeline with ceramic sweep elbows everywhere the line turned. 399

There’s something odd about an industry that’s designed to be good for the environment having environmental concerns of its own. Yet that’s just what was happening at Montgomery County’s North Incinerator plant, which converts household waste to energy in the Dayton, Ohio, area. Try as they did, engineers could not find a way to convey powdered lime — part of the plant’s phase pneumatic conveying system — for any great length of time before a sweep elbow failure resulted in a plant shutdown and expensive cleanup operation. 396

A customer of ours — a PVC pipe producer with $40 million in annual sales — uses a pneumatic conveying system to transfer resin and pellets from storage to the pipe extruders. The abrasive nature of their product was causing elbow wear — and serious down time — every couple of months. Another customer producing vinyl windows and extrusions experienced elbow failure &mash; along with expensive down time and EPA fines — every couple of weeks. PVC resin running from hoppers to the plants mixers at a rate of up to 34,000 pounds per day was simply too much for conventional sweep elbows. HammerTek’s Smart Elbow deflection elbow was engineered for PVC.  382

Your conveyor system is your company’s lifeline. Anything — make that everything — you can do to keep it performing at peak capacity will carry through to your bottom line. There is nothing “routine” about routine maintenance. When your system is down for any reason, even if just for a few minutes, those few minutes cost real dollars. That’s why we invented the Smart Elbow deflection elbow in the first place. 374

The ingenious engineering behind HammerTek’s Smart Elbow deflection elbow — how its patented deflection zone reduces elbow wear, and with it product contamination and especially costly down time — isn’t always easy to explain. As a result, this blog, along with a virtual library of case studies, tends to focus on industry problems — and their Smart Elbow deflection elbow solutions. But whether you are conveying grains, plastics, abrasives, or something else entirely, we can do so much more than write about how others with similar issues now save time and money simply by upgrading their lines to include Smart Elbow deflection elbow technology. Our Video Library allows you to see it for yourself. 371

Keeping your costs down is easy with the Smart Elbow deflection elbow. In an actual conveyance installation, a long-sweep elbow made of stainless steel was wearing out every four months, requiring downtime, installation effort and of course the replacement cost of the elbows. 367

When Miller Brewing Company’s Fort Worth, TX facility needed to make a change in its conveying system, HammerTek and its patented Smart Elbow® deflection elbow proved the right recipe for the job. Roy Marin, staff engineer at the facility, needed to replace a worn-out automatic diverter that switched its rail car unload line from one storage silo to another. This diverter had been a source of maintenance and housekeeping problems, and Marin wanted to replace it with a new piping panel. The trick was getting the new piping to fit into the confined space the diverter once occupied; the conventional solution, a piping manifold using 4-foot-radius sweep elbows, just wouldn’t be small enough. 354

The Engineers at PECO Energy Company’s Eddystone Generating Plant near Philadelphia had a problem on their hands: The scrubbing process line responsible for meeting Federal emissions standards was failing on a regular basis, causing costly cleanup, environmental and regulatory concerns. The plant utilizes a magnesium oxide-based scrubbing process to remove sulfur dioxide — a component in acid rain — from the coal-fired plant’s exhaust. Magnesium oxide powder is conveyed pneumatically from storage silos to a mixer that 345

Robert Forgione was tired of slipping and sliding his way through another pile of dry pebble line and dust, half-blinded by the cloud it had created as it spewed from a failed conveying line elbow at the Upper Occoquan Water Reclamation Plant in Centreville, Virginia. The half-inch hole created by the mere passage of lime powder through a bend in a line, called a sweep elbow in the industry, had blown the fine powder all over the building, creating not only a gigantic, slippery mess, but hazards to breathing, above-acceptable air quality levels, and danger to sensitive electronic controls — not to mention the cost of downtime on the line. 334

Gary Wright may have discovered something that works better than duct tape. Wright is director of plant engineering at RheTech Inc. of Whitmore Lake, Michigan, an industry that designs, manufactures and produces propriety thermoplastic polyolefin alloys and compounds that are sold to the transportation and consumer durable goods markets. In 1998, RheTech opened a new plant in Fowlerville, Michigan. 325

Tom Sorensen had a real dilemma on his hands. And it was on his hands because it wouldn’t stay in his plant’s conveying lines where it belonged. His problem: When your plant manufactures highly abrasive ceramic beads that are used as proppants in oil and gas exploration and drilling, how do you keep those beads from doing their destructive work inside your conveying lines? Carbo Ceramics’ Eufaula, Ala. facility manufactures calcined kaolin ceramic beads that are used by global giants like Halliburton and Schlumberger. The beads are pumped into well bores to prop open newly induced fractures and enhance the flow of oil and natural gas to the surface. 314