Yesterday we made some large composite wear rings for water pumps. This was a major overhaul and our original material ran excellent for the last 9.5 years. These pumps run in a desalination plant and are in contact with seawater with high chlorine content from the reverse osmosis process.

The decision was made to use our material for three major reasons:

- Huge efficiency improvements due to running on closer wear ring clearances.
- No electrical corrosion problems between different metals.
- Return on investment (R.O.I.) was below 1 year.

Tenmax developed a special composite material and machining process to ensure the best fit and the machining tolerances of these huge thermoplastic composite rings.

For more information or inquiries please contact one of our engineers here.

Years ago, we got a lot of questions from our customers to supply a good alternative to replace Ceramic and Silicon bearing assemblies in (Vertical) pumps. Ceramic and Silicon bearing assemblies often suffer under dry run or semi-dry run conditions during the start or stop of the equipment. Also chipping of bearing material can be serious problem due to vibrations. Spreading of these chips can damage expensive pump parts or other plant equipment due which will lead to more unplanned downtime.

On customer demand and successful field tests we developed TMCS25.

TMCS25 is a thermoplastic with a more than excellent wear rate. Many Sic/Ceramic applications we encounter can be changed out by TMCS25 dependent on the application properties. Another huge benefit is that our TMCS25 can run against a normal hard metal.

Customers therefore only need one stationary part and not 2 expensive pieces of Ceramic/Sic. Furthermore, customers have all good benefits of a thermoplastic.

TMCS25 can be machined after assembly if needed.

For more information or inquiries please contact one of our engineers here.

Our customer, a well-known pump repair company, asked TENMAX to solve the problems of their end user. This Oil & Gas company faced many reliability problems with all their liquid gas pumps. The MTBF (mean time between failures) was totally unpredictable. The main problems are the use of carbon and ceramic bushings/bearings supplied by the pump OEM. After an investigation by reliability engineers they noticed that the failures in most cases started with bushing or bearing failure. As mentioned in the failure report the bearing or bushing material failed due 3 reasons ; thermoshock, dry-run problems and vibrations.

As known liquid gasses are bad lubricators and when the pump temperature rises a little or the discharge pressure drops there will be no liquid gas in the rotating parts but merely gas! Situations like this mostly occur by start or stop the pump installation, but also during running of pump curve.

They chose TENMAX TMC materials after a field test and concluded that TMC materials can handle thermoshock, can run dry and are able to resist vibrations.

Customers commentary :
“We like to work with TENMAX for their pump knowledge and redesign capabilities to change out pump materials, also they do it all: from engineering the materials to final machining.”

For more information or inquiries please contact one of our engineers here.

Over the last 15 years we noticed several problems with pumping and handling of liquid gasses, LNG and other media used at extreme low temperature with a low viscosity. In most applications the conventional bearing and wear ring materials can not handle these low viscosity and extreme low temperatures. In these applications the temperature can rise a little and/or the pressure can drop suddenly for short times depending on operation conditions.

With more conventional materials this will cause serious damage to the parts and their MTBR (Mean time between failure) falls down, but many times this is noticed when it is too late. Even little pressure drops in the system are able to cause the bearings to fail, which is why, contrary to liquids, they require lubrication for use with (liquid) gasses.

Our materials are able to handle and survive these critical moments. Tenmax materials always keep their excellent mechanical properties during extreme low temperatures regardless of loading times or media which it comes to contact with.

The TMC materials we recommend for these kind of applications are made for a temperature range from -150C up to 285C. Compared to others they are extreme wear resistant and almost chemical inert while they don't swell in media and don't suffer from aging.

We always advice to use different TMC materials for wear rings and for bearings. Superior materials we recommend for liquid gas applications are TMC 7601, TMC 7601-4, TMC S25 and TMC H60.

Using our TMC materials will give better NPSH and huge savings on energy. But most importantly more reliability and safety!

For more information or inquiries please contact one of our engineers here.