When you hear “account manager” you most likely think sales. At Decatur Industrial, an account manager is so much more than a sales person. Our Account Managers are Reliability Specialists and can help provide technical support and application expertise.
A power generation facility was pulling a 4000 HP fan motor in order to remove a coupling hub worth over $30,000 from the motor’s shaft to be installed on their spare. Removing these couplings has always proved a challenge due to the .011” interference fit between the motor shaft and coupling bore. The attempt by the plant to remove the coupling was again unsuccessful. The Reliability Maintenance Supervisor decided to reach out to Kent Henry, D.I.E. Reliability Specialist, for knowledge support with this particular situation.
Once on-site, Kent met with the Supervisor and the plant technicians to review how they initially approached the project. They had set up the hydraulic input to the coupling which was intended to expand the coupling for removal per the OEM training. From that information, we formulated a new plan we felt would be successful and included two critical adjustments:
- We changed the hydraulic system oil weight to provide more lubricity between the shaft and coupling hub bore.
- Rather than applying abrupt hydraulic pressure up to 18,000 psi to the coupling hydraulic ports and expecting the coupling to move, we used reduce pressure planning to apply this force for a longer period of time.
As it turned out, about 70% of that maximum pressure was all that needed to be applied hydraulically to expand and lubricate the coupling hub. Through our method, the customer saved potential damage to the $30,000 coupling, the motor shaft, and we saved them the time of having to send out to a repair facility.