Our client has been a trusted supplier of engineering & lubricant products to UK industrial markets for over 30 years. They also provide a range of supporting services such as refurbishment engineering.
With more and more companies moving towards preventative maintenance programmes to save production time and reduce waste, our client's industrial engineering team provide refurbishment services for huge industrial laundry drying equipment. Here is how our surface preparation and non-stick coating expertise has been utilised to refurbish laundry dryer screen plates.
The Challenge
In industrial laundries, it is common that items such as plastic bags are accidentally processed with the laundry. During the drying process, the plastic bags soften and begin to stick to the screens that are on the exterior of the drying drum. This in turn blocks the holes in the screen, which reduces the performance of the dryer and therefore decreases throughput and increases costs. The dryer must be taken out of service while the screen plates are removed and replaced with new ones. To minimise how often replacement of the screen plates is done the OEM screen plates are coated with non-stick easy clean coatings. In order to find a more cost-effective solution for their customers, our client approached us to see if there was an alternative to replacing the screen plates with new ones.
Our Solution
The first stage was to remove the plastic residue that was stuck on the screens, as well as the existing coating that had lost its non-stick properties. Our Pyrolysis Oven is an extremely effective solution for the removal of plastic or paint coatings and contaminants.
Once we had removed the coating and plastic, we were able to grit blast the surface to create a perfect key for the AFC 3100 non-stick coating.
Our expert technicians understand that the importance of excellent surface preparation to ensure the maximum performance from our coatings. No matter how good our AFC 3100 coating is, a poorly prepared surface would mean the coating would not perform to the expected standard.
The final stage was to spray apply and cure the excellent AFC 3100 non-stick coating. Our AFC 3100 coating has a specially prepared substrate for optimum cleanliness and adhesion of the stainless steel hard base, which will extend the lifecycle of the screen plates.
The Results
The performance of the newly coated screens is as good, if not better, than the original OEM parts. Our clients' customers also benefit from a 50-75% cost saving when compared to purchasing new screen plates. And to top it all off, recoating is a much more environmentally friendly solution.
