Exploring Wear Protection Options for Pump Components

The components within a pump are subject to in-service cavitation damage, corrosion, and wear. The efficiency of a pump is severely reduced by these conditions. Relatedly, the pump’s life cycle cost is increased exponentially. Wear protection for pump parts is an essential consideration in industries today.

Addressing the Problem of Pump Wear

Depending on the environment in which a pump is used, cavitation, corrosion, and wear can be extensive. To reduce costs and increase the life expectancy of a pump and its parts, surfaces must be protected. To address this problem effectively and efficiently, surface coatings can be thermal sprayed onto pump components to discourage the above stated degradation mechanisms. Today, numerous types of thermal spray coatings and techniques are available.

How Do Pumps Wear?

While in service, sliding wear, cavitation, erosion, and abrasion can wear down a pump and its parts. When the medium being pumped consists of abrasive particles, erosion and abrasion will result. But galling (sliding) wear can result even when no abrasive particles are present. This has everything to do with stationary and rotating components unintentionally coming into contact with each other.

High-energy pumps, with their high flow velocities, increase wear rates significantly, even if they are dealing with the processing of media that is only mildly corrosive. The synergistic relationship between corrosion and wear is unexpectedly high when it comes to these types of pumps.

Over time, the efficiency of a pump will decrease as a result of vane angle changes and critical sealing clearance increases. These are a direct result of flow path wear. Abrasion wear is also common in shaft sleeves, lubricated bearings, and other pump areas. Eventually, the result can be leakage or increased vibration. All of these lead to the previously stated life cycle cost increases and decrease in life expectancy of the pump.

A Solution to a Problem

To increase life expectancy and reduce costs, any number of strategies are available. The bottom line is that pump component wear must be reduced as much as possible. The design of a pump is a good start, but the use of more sophisticated materials is undeniably the answer to the problem. These materials can consist of rubber, ceramics, high-alloy steels, etc. To manage wear, the most cost-effective and successful tools are surface coatings.

Technologies in Surface Coating

Pump degradation due to cavitation, corrosion, and wear can be protected against with today’s thermal spray surface coatings. Traditionally, these coatings were based on cobalt-chrome and nickel-chrome alloys. But, thanks to modern science and technology, commercially available coating materials that offer even more improved wear resistance (such as CMC or ceramic metal composite) are also available.

At A & A Coatings, we use the latest technologies and techniques to apply our thermal spray protective coatings to your pump parts and other machinery, components, surfaces, parts, etc. Contact us today to find out how thermal spray coatings can benefit you, your company, and your industry. Chances are, everyone else in your industry is already using thermal spray protection. Don’t get left behind.