H P In Reliability

Heinz P. Bloch, Reliability/Equipment Editor

Eliminating cooling water from pumps

Extensive experimentation with removing cooling water from pumps and general-purpose turbine drivers in large petrochemical plants indicates that machinery reliability may increase. The obvious savings in capital expenditures for piping and water-treatment facilities, and savings in operating cost alone, provide good incentives to take a closer look at this topic. Discontinue pedestal cooling. It has been shown conclusively over many years that pedestal cooling is not required for any centrifugal pump generally found in pertochemical plants. Pumping services with uid temperatures as high as 740F (393C) require nothing more than hot alignment verication between driver and pump. Risk of pump res due to cooling water-induced corrosion, and subsequent pedestal collapse has been eliminated by numerous companies that accepted this experience-based recommendation decades ago. Mechanical seal cooling alternatives. Pump stufng-box jacket cooling, while reducing heat migration from the pump casing toward the bearing housing, will not lower the temperature in the seal environment. A changeover to high-temperature mechanical seals may be possible and is preferred by U.S. plants. If mechanical seals need cooling because the ush liquid has a low boiling point, the least troublesome way to control seal temperatures may be to circulate a coolant such a water, steam, or cool ushing oil through an external seal ush cooler. However, many hot services may be ideally suited for a maintenancefree dead-ended ush arrangement. This option may become entirely feasible if narrow-face seals or suitable seal housing internal geometries are selected. Bearing cooling not usually needed. Cooling water can be deleted from many sleeve bearings on centrifugal pumps and on small turbine drivers after experimentally verifying that oil sump temperatures do not exceed 180F (82C). This limit was found to be extremely conservative from a
eliminatingcoolhpbloch.pdf August '02 Rev. 0

bearing-life point of view. If it is exceeded by a few degrees, more frequent oil sampling or synthetic lubricants will help. Since most general-purpose machinery is equipped with antifriction bearings, signicant maintenance credits can result from eliminating cooling water from antifriction bearings on pumps and small steam turbines. Experience shows that equipment life can actually be extended by removing cooling water from bearings. Cooling bearing oil sumps invites moisture condensation, and bearings will fail much more readily if the oil is contaminated by water. Laboratory tests show that even trace amounts of water in the lube oil are highly detrimental. Hydrogen embrittlement on the steel granular structure can reduce expected bearing life to less than one-fth normal or rated values. Another reason for not cooling the bearing housing of pumps and drivers is to maintain proper bearing internal clearances. Hot-service pump bearings have often failed immediately after startup when the bearing housings were cooled by water. When it was recognized that high temperature gradients were responsible for reducing bearing clearances to unacceptably low values, a heating medium was introduced into the bearing bracket to heat the housing. The problem was solved. Parameters inuencing bearing cooling. Minimum permissible viscosity of ball-bearing lube oils at the bearing operating temperature is a function of bearing size and speed. As a rule of thumb and valid for most bearings operating in typical centrifugal pumps, rated bearing life will be obtained if metal temperatures of operating bearings remain low enough to ensure minimum viscosities of 150 SUS (32.1cSt) for spherical roller bearings in thrust-loaded services, 100 SUS (20.6 cSt) for radially loaded spherical roller bearings, and 70 SUS (13.1 cSt) for ball and cylindrical roller bearings. If the viscosities drop below the given values, the oil lm may have insufcient adhesion or strength, and metal-tometal contact could result. It is safe to assume that standard antifriction bearings will show no loss of life as long as metal temperatures do not exceed 250F (121C).
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Maintaining oil temperatures within given limits is thus aimed at satisfying only two requirements: 1. Oil viscosities must remain sufciently high to adequately coat the rolling elements under the most adverse operating temperature. 2. Oil additives, such as oxidation inhibitors, must not be boiled off, i.e., adequate service life of the lubricant must be maintained. A properly formulated diester or PAO-based synthetic lubricant would be ideally suited in this case.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Excerpted from the authors text Improving Machinery Reliability, Second Edition, Gulf Publishing Company, Houston, Texas, 1988.

The author is a consulting engineer in Montgomery, Texas. He advises modern process plants worldwide on reliability improvement and maintenance cost reduction opportunities.