Urgent gearbox repair

Feed pump on an agricultural 500KW CHP biogas plant

Pumps are the workhorse of the biogas industry, you’ll find them on every site: feeding liquids, moving liquids from one place to another and removing liquids for treatment or off site recycling.  Sometimes, you’ll be lucky enough to have one pump per operation and even luckier if each pump has a duty-assist or standby to take over when they’re down. However, most times one pump will be working a number of operations acts as a single point of failure.

In this case – it’s a small progressive cavity pump fulfilling a number of liquid feed and recirculation functions that’s producing an unusual loud sound and high degree of vibration.  The site called ADAM to investigate, having been flagged during regular checks.

The pump assembly from gearbox-to-rod coupling was removed and taken to the workshop where ADAM engineers disassembled and reassembled the unit with a new mech seal, UJs & rod coupling.Once complete, the assembly was brought back to site where it was hoisted and reattached to the pump assembly.  Electrical connections were reconnected and fan cover bolted back on before the equipment lock-offs and isolations were removed. The system was function tested and several trial feeds were run, demonstrating it to be fully operational (no knocks, bangs or unusual vibrations).

Happy client.  Back up and running in less than 8 hours.  Well done ADAM.