Chrome White Iron Elbow Spool Saves Company Millions

A multinational oil and gas company approached Penticton Foundry to solve a wear problem with their 90° CCO spool which needed to be removed from service every 12 weeks (2000 hours) and weld repaired.  Unfortunately, this meant that an additional spool had to be kept in inventory as the weld repair took several days to complete. 

Complicating this process was the location of the 90° spool which made it very difficult to remove and replace.  It required, in fact, the positioning of cranes and scaffolding, something that took two days to build, resulting in additional labor time and costs.

For Penticton Foundry, using chrome white iron offered the best solution for solving the oil and gas company’s wear concerns.  A high chrome white iron liner was created.  It was in service for 48 weeks (8000 hours) before it needed to be replaced.  This resulted in a significant cost savings to the customer as they were able to extend their scheduled preventive maintenance shutdowns from 6 weeks to 8 weeks.

What’s particularly exciting is the chance to innovate on an already successful product by learning from the wear patterns on the first spool.  We are creating a new design proposal that would significantly increase operational time yet again.  Stay tuned.

Key Takeaways

• The chrome white iron elbow lasted 4x longer than the CCO spool
• While the company still has to shut down each line on 8 week intervals due to other components requiring maintenance (i.e. pumps), the high chrome white iron elbow is performing at expectations
• The company has reduced their preventative maintenance shutdowns to 7 per year from 9 per year resulting in millions in savings

Penticton Foundry – Fuelled by Innovation