Oil Flushing Services Needed After Catastrophic Downtime
For the past 3 years, I have been working with a major steel manufacturer in supplying dedicated offline filtration equipment and MRO filer elements for their mill stand lube oil system. They have been needing to flush their mill stands and lube oil lines for several years but have not done so due to high product demand. The area manager and I discussed flushing the system in the fall of 2024, but that flush was put off.
PFP Service Crew performs high velocity flushing for a major steel manufacturer.
The plant kept operating with frequent failures and the maintenance team doing repairs as quickly as possible to keep production going. And then it happened…
The customer finally experienced a catastrophic failure of a mill stand that shut the plant down for several days while repairs were made. After this failure, plant management made the decision to shut the mill down and do a high velocity flush of the mill stands and lube system.
Developing a High Velocity Flushing Plan for The Steel Mill
PFP’s lead service techs conducted a site visit in May to develop a flush plan that would minimize the amount of downtime for the mill. Our crew would have to flush piping ranging from 2” to 6” and achieve a cleanliness code of NAS 7 or better to be considered a successful flush. The flush was scheduled to start on June 30th and run through the July 4th weekend. We estimated the flush could take up to 7 days.
PFP service crew evaluates bag filter housing at the steel mill facility.
Our service crew arrived at the mill on June 30th and worked with the on-site mill piping contractor to set up our flushing equipment and make connections to the mill piping. The flush began on the 6” piping and had an initial ISO Cleanliness Code of 21/20/19, NAS*. After 4 hours of flushing, the Cleanliness Code increased to 25/24/21, indicating high levels of contamination in the piping. After running for a second day on the 6” piping, we achieved a Cleanliness Code of 18/10/8, NAS 3.
Dirty Bag Filters after Flushing Operation at Steel Mill
Results: Cleanliness Code Targets Exceeded with Faster Than Expected Completion
The following days consisted of flushing the supply piping and mill stands. The final mill stand’s Cleanliness Codes ranged from a NAS 0 to NAS 4. Once all the mill stand flushes were completed, our crew drained all the piping, hoses, and flushing equipment into waste totes for proper disposal. The mill lube system was refilled with new oil upon the completion of the high velocity flush.
Our expert service crew was able to flush the entire system in 4 days and achieve a better than agreed upon target Cleanliness Code on all system piping. The customer was able to start the mill sooner than planned and saved money on the flush by having the work done 3 days earlier than expected.
PFP exceeded ISO Code Cleanliness target in less time than expected