The Customer
The Company is an international supplier of pre-painted metal to the building, automotive and white goods manufacturing sectors.
The Process
Aluminum is uncoiled and chemically cleaned, treated and rinsed to prepare the surface for optimum coating adhesion and corrosion protection. A coating of different solvents is applied uniformly to both sides of the strip. The coated coil is then oven cured to the desired performance specifications. During the curing process solvent vapors are driven off. These vapors are then collected and sent to an oxidizer for destruction.
The Problem
The Company was installing a new Regenerative Thermal Oxidizer on their coil coating line. The RTO manufacturer would not allow the oxidizer to be started up without solvent vapor analyzers being online and working properly. The Company had 15 year old Control Instruments SNR550 LFL analyzers but they had been offline for a number of years. They needed to get them back on-line and working properly. The Company contacted the factory about restart of the units. They wanted a service technician to come immediately to perform maintenance, calibration and restart. Because these are old systems the delivery time for some of the spare parts could take many weeks and in some cases months. These long delivery times would hinder the speed of the RTO commissioning and their production schedule.
The Solution
The Company wanted immediate action so CIC suggested that they purchase new PrevEx Flammability analyzers to replace the critical SNR550s. The cost of this was comparable to on-site service and the basic spare part requirements that would be needed for re-start. Installation of the PrevEx analyzers would be easy since they use the same utilities and mount to the duct work in the same way as the SNR550s. In addition they could be up and running within two weeks of when the order was placed.
The Company chose to buy one PrevEx analyzer to see how it would perform. They immediately saw the time and cost benefits of the new system: quicker response time, stand-alone independent system that required no controller or associated wiring, automatic calibration eliminating manual adjustments as well as predictive maintenance & on-board diagnostics for easy troubleshooting. After this successful installation the Company chose to purchase several more.