Rexnord™ Planetgear has Simplified Maintenance
Rexnord™ Planetgear; has simplified maintenance, reduced downtime and lowered drive replacement costs for a cement company.
A practical solution was needed to avoid replacing the entire units, which would have been impractical due to numerous configuration changes requiring extensive modifications and time-consuming realignment.
The Cement Company installed Rexnord Planetgear drives on everything from screw conveyors to bucket elevators.
The new Rexnord Planetgear replacement had successfully simplified maintenance, reduced downtime, and lowered drive replacement costs.
By replacing conventional right-angle gear drives with Planetgear drives on everything from screw conveyors to bucket elevators, the Phoenix Cement Company has simplified maintenance, reduced downtime, and lowered drive replacement costs. In the 10 years after the first unit was installed, the plant’s assistant manager replaced approximately 20 different reducers with the new drives.
The 650,000 tpy Phoenix Cement plant in Clarkdale, Arizona, a few hours north of Phoenix, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and serves markets throughout Arizona, as well as Southern California, Nevada, and New Mexico. A fleet of 100-ton haul trucks feeds the plant’s primary crusher from an open-pit quarry. After size reduction in a secondary crusher, the product is ground in the raw mill and blended before being processed through one of three kilns and finish mills.
When some of the original gear reducers in the plant needed replacement, Assistant Plant Manager-Maintenance Joe D’Avignon recalls, “I put one of the Rexnord Planetgear drives on a screw conveyor and found it was rugged and easy to work on. Over time, I added more and more, on other screw conveyors, belt conveyors and elevators, so they’re our standard now."
D’Avignon explains that much of the equipment previously was equipped with conventional right-angle gear boxes. When it became necessary to replace gears in some of the reducers, he found he would have had to replace the entire gear train at a cost greater than the reducer’s original cost.
Replacing the entire unit with the same kind of reducer also was impractical, since many of the configurations had changed and would have required extensive modification of the base and time-consuming realignment.
By contrast, the Planetgear reducers were easy to install with a coupling. They also required less room and fewer modifications to the base because of their in-line, planetary configuration. According to D’Avignon, replacing right-angle reducers with Planetgear reducers has resulted in considerable cost savings in downtime, in addition to the lower cost of the components. When required, maintenance and repairs are easier and faster.
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