Advanced Diamond Technologies Inc. (ADT) launched a new series of mechanical seals to improve efficiency, save energy, and reduce costs in fluid pumping systems. Known as ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD) seals, these products are designed to provide the advantages of diamond at prices comparable to silicon carbide face seals.
UNCD is so smooth, according to the company, that it can be run directly against conventional blister resistant carbon and silicon carbide counterfaces making UNCD seals suitable for a wide variety of pumping applications.
"Industry has been waiting for a long time to leverage the benefits of diamond—its hardness, chemical inertness and low friction qualities—in affordable face seals," says ADT President Neil Kane.
In promoting its new seals, the company citied statistics from the U.S. Dept. of Energy, which says more than 50% of pump life-cycle costs result from energy and maintenance expenses; and energy savings of 20% or more are possible with systems optimization.
"In accelerated wear tests with extremely poor lubrication we have seen negligible wear on the UNCD faces and reductions in the coefficient of friction of over 75%. In the same tests silicon carbide faces fail due to severe leakage," says Charles West, ADT vice president of engineering.
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On ADT’s website, a comparison is made between UNCD Seals and SiC. After thousands of hours of operation, says the company, UNCD Seals consistently outlasted SiC faces in poor lubricating conditions of 250-300°F hot water. In head-to-head industrial tests, UNCD Seals, says ADT, have shown negligible or minimal wear whereas SiC faces experienced deep grooving resulting in pump leakage. UNCD Seals have also been shown, when running against SiC, to have coefficients of friction of 0.02-0.04. These are well below the typical values when running SiC in hard-on-hard applications, says ADT. The reduced friction during operation of UNCD Seals results in reduced seal cavity temperatures when running in ANSI slurry pumping applications.
The company is now offering these UNCD products:
- Component seals: A line of O-ring pusher seals with diamond mating rings and blister resistant carbons are available now. The option of both antimony-filled carbon primary (rotaries) and self-sintered SiC primaries (hard-on-hard applications) are available upon request.
- Cartridge seals: A line of UNCD cartridge seals for ANSI pumps with shaft diameters between one and two inches will also be available in early 2008.
Other special applications are also available. The company relied on funding from the National Science Foundation's Small Business Innovation Research program and the support of the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Industrial Technologies Program for the development and characterization of ultrananocrystalline diamond for rotating equipment applications by Argonne National Laboratory.
More technical details are available here: http://www.diamondseals.com/diamondseals/Seals_Technical_2.asp
SOURCE: Advanced Diamond Technologies Inc.
