SUURMOND SUPPLIES PUMPS FOR NEW AKZONOBEL PLANT

Pumps for a paint job Working with project engineering company Projen, Suurmond UK Limited supplied pump units of various sizes for a new paint plant being built by AkzoNobel in Ashington, Northumberland. The £100m plant will be the cornerstone of AkzoNobels decorative paint production for the UK and Europe. Suurmond are a distributor for Maag Pump Systems, part of Pump Solutions Group a Dover Company. Maag Pumps have been manufacturing gear pumps since 1928 and their products having evolved over the years to form the benchmark product for precise, pulseless flow for challenging applications. Challenging applications Maag offer a range of pumps manufactured from cast iron and stainless steel for the standard range to Hastelloy and more exotic alloys for the specialist applications. Their products serve all applications from oil transfer to polymer production and are capable of pumping fluids in a viscosity range from water-like fluids to fluids up to 4 million mPas. One of Maag’s key features is the ability to pump very high viscosity fluids pulselessly and efficiently. Requirements Suurmond UK selected Maag pumps for the Ashington project as their process performance and reliability are ideally suited to the project and process requirements. A basic requirement of the project was to deliver pump units that met all the process requirements within a strict delivery schedule. The process requirements of the project for AkzoNobel meant Maag Pumps were the obvious choice as, in many of the applications, the fluids have low viscosity but still needed to be volumetrically efficient across a very wide range of flow rates. In some cases the required turndown was up to 18:1, this means that the maximum flow was up to 18 times greater than the minimum flow rate. Pump selection Maag CINOX® pumps were selected for the project because the materials of the construction are well suited to chemical applications. The CINOX® pump has a stainless steel body, stainless steel shafts (gears) and combined with carbon bearings and a mechanical seal it makes a perfect choice for providing pulseless flow for chemical processing. Years of experience has allowed Maag to develop features within the pumps that set them apart from the rest of the industry. Features like internal lubrication channels, optimized flow channels and process specific clearances have been engineered to give the best possible performance even in the most challenging of conditions. Skid The Maag pumps were coupled with ABB drives for this project. The pump units supplied by Suurmond have been integrated into skid units designed by Projen and were assembled and tested by Merit Merrell Limited and AkzoNobel engineering staff. Once the function testing and inspection have been completed of all the various skid units they will be installed in the new plant and commissioned ready for production to begin. Suurmond will continue to work with AkzoNobel engineering staff to ensure that the pump units perform as expected and to provide ongoing support to provide AkzoNobel with best value.