Cooling Tower Gearboxes

Bob, you’re aware, the environment within cooling towers is very hostile. This allows your gearboxes to absorb huge amounts of water from the air on even the slightest temperature change. Although OEMs typically allow water limits of 2000 ppm, this is far too high. Research shows that water hydrolyzes to form acid contaminants at levels of only 200-300 ppm. I have information on a device that is far superior to desiccant breathers. The system is inexpensive and easy to install, has no moving parts or electrical connections, and requires no
maintenance. If you would like any information on this please dont hesitate to send me an email.

JP Chapin

j.chapin@fluitec.com

Hi Bob

Cooling Towers are difficult to maintain as the drives are changing temp and breathing the local environs in.
We monitor several large sites and there are cooling tower drives laying around all over the site dead with their legs in the air.
Failure mode the smallest bearing in the drive indicating hard particle ingress in this instance,
The best way of removing the difficulty is to fit a lung type breather, we can send you the plans of how to make using local parts,

To sample we have a dedicated sample line that we pump out 2 X volume then sample for the lab

Regards


Rob S

lab@rttech.com.au

www.rttech.com.au

Hi Bob, some more food for thought, a low pressure dry air external supply. This would basically over ride any potential for contamination ingress through the seals etc. If your dessicant pre-filter becomes saturated the negitave pressure in the gearbox may preferentially allow moisture to be sucked in through the shaft seals etc. It should be a reasonable easy calculation gbx air volume, max operational fluid temp and minimum oil temp. That should be sufficient to calculate the required air flow. You will find it will be quite low volumes. If you are using compressed air an air amplifier should be considered to lower operational costs.
regards.....