Low-friction coating to improve pumping efficiency? 1

[antoc]

Dear colleagues
We are looking for Low-friction coating to improve pumping efficiency.
Are there other products beside Belzona & Corrocoat products for that kind of Low-friction coating?

 

[thewellguy]

Could you elaborate a little more as to what you are trying to accomplish? Off the top of my head you could try a different construction material, glass lined bowls, wear rings, or make sure the pump is running at B.E.P.

 

[FlowTechEngineer]

I have used coatings such as the ones you mentioned to improve a pumps efficiency. I used it on large pumps, 45" impeller, and got approximately 1% in efficiency. Since you are in "Chemical", I would assume you are working on a relatively small pump. If that is the case, a coating may have marginal benefit. You may need to change the pump to a more efficient design at you duty conditions.

 

[EdStainless]

Duromar makes some good products.
But I go with the last post. Unless you are dealing with hundreds of HP and are running exactly at BEP this will be more effort than it is worth.
I have flow polished pump stages with a slurry extrusion process. That did help, but we were actually slightly changing the stage geometry

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Plymouth Tube

 

[daveboy]

What you are trying to do is reduce the surface roughness to reduce disk friction and change the vortexing in the side wall gap to reduce leakage and give an overall improvement in efficency.

As with flow in pipes it is Reynolds number dependant.

The paper below gives you some theoretical and empirical background that you can use to evaluate potential for your specific design.

http://lmh

http://www.epfl.ch/Publications/Public.pdf/PUMPPU_008.pdf

 

[FACS]

Don't know what type of pump you are talking about. We used to do Teflon impregnation on gear pumps.

Charlie

http://www.facsco.com

 

[Cheddarcaveman]

You don't give us enough information to be able to fully answer your question. The important information is "what are you pumping, what sort of volume"? As has been said smal pump applications would not really benefit from an internal coating.
We used to coat eight foot diameter Thames water pumps with one of the Devcon rubber type products, both as a friction reducer and to improve wear resistance. Worked very well from a wear resistance point of view but not sure about the improvement in performance.

 

[antoc]

I am looking to improve pumping efficiency with 40" impeller that pumps drinking water.

 

[Artisi]

Is it a radial, mixed or axial flow impeller? An impeller of 40" certinly allows for a lot of hand dressing / polishing etc to be undertaken which will help improve efficiency.