Richard Schildwachter

Wondering what it takes to prepare for an on-site visit with our service technicians? We’ve put together a checklist detailing each step in that process.

When a Separators Inc. service technician travels to perform centrifuge maintenance in your facilities, having the right machinery and equipment in place helps ensure the service goes off without a hitch. I’ll detail what you need to know about machinery and equipment below, but before I go any further, know that you can get your copy of the Pre-Maintenance Checklist here. 

We’ve put together a checklist our customers can use to prepare for an on-site visit from our service technicians. Separators service technicians travel all across the United States to perform centrifuge maintenance in our customers’ facilities. Because we perform service on-site, we check on and verify a handful of items before the day of the service visit. Before I go any further, know that you can get your copy of the Pre-Maintenance Checklist here.

In our day-to-day and professional lives, receiving maintenance is a pretty common occurrence. Automobiles and homes require routine maintenance. All types of machinery, heavy equipment, and tools also require their own maintenance in order to keep them operational. But everything runs on its own maintenance schedule and requires different tools and resources.

There are endless ways to decrease and improve your separation process efficiency. As you know, centrifuges are rated by the volume of material they process per hour. If your centrifuge is rated at 40,000 lbs. per hour, that's the greatest amount of material it can process efficiently.  

We offer a wide array of services at Separators - from custom automation technology and control panels to fully remanufactured equipment and training. But more than anything else, we are a service company. Meeting both the day-to-day and unexpected needs of centrifuge equipment is at the core of what we do.

In today’s world, if you run separators, you run with automation. Sure, you might have components of your process that are still manual, but overall, automation is what’s responsible for the performance of each centrifuge. Feedback from pressure transmitters, temperature meters, and back pressure valves communicate with a control system, telling the automation how to adjust processes in real-time. That, in effect, is what controls the machines.

An unbalanced centrifuge is a recipe for disaster. Centrifuges spin at very high speeds, and they do so for hours on end. Some facilities run their centrifuges 24/7, only pausing for CIP procedures and the occasional service visit. When a bowl starts to get off balance – and they always do at some point or another – they continue to get more and more off balance as time goes on.

And the further from balanced an industrial centrifuge becomes, the more inefficient and dangerous it becomes. So, what do you do? You get your bowl balanced.

Before we dive into the role air pressure plays in centrifuge performance, it’s important to point out that air pressure is just one factor out of many. In other words, air pressure is important, but it’s not the whole picture. With that being said, here’s a look at how air pressure impacts centrifuge separators.

It’s pretty common for customers and clients to ask me how long their centrifuges should last, and the truth is, the answer depends on how well they’re maintained. The length of time a centrifuge remains operational is significantly impacted by whether or not it receives those major and minor services that are recommended by manufacturers (and in some instances required by insurance companies or industry guidelines).

In many facilities, the centrifuge is critical to daily operations. And if separation equipment is not running at its best, other parts of the production process are impacted. In the event of a breakdown, catastrophic or not, the entire facility is affected. Having a qualified service technician inspect and maintain your equipment can keep your production pace moving and help you avoid costly downtime.