Reducing Pump and Motor Failures

Reducing Pump and Motor Failures

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Find out how we helped a plastic-bag recycler save more than $150,000 a year by adding bidirectional filtration to protect pumps and motors.

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A company shredding discarded grocery bags and other plastic films to produce recycled products began to experience frequent hydraulic motor- and charge-pump failures on the closed-loop hydraulic system driving a bag shredder. 

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This led to microscopic slivers of the plastic generated by the process finding their way into the fluid, causing pump or motor failures, which in turn created a large cloud of debris particles in the hydraulic fluid. Those particles traveled from one component to the next, repeating the sequence of failure and increasing fluid contamination and creating a catastrophic climate throughout the system. 

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The company told us this chain of events generally occurred twice a year, costing them approximately $110k in repairs, in addition to downtime and maintenance hours. They needed a solution to reduce the frequency of these catastrophic failures, and increase profitability and plant efficiency.

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Bennett sales engineer arrived to assess the situation, and noted a lack of filtration between the pump and motors, and inefficient filter elements being implemented in existing housings. Even more troublesome, they determined that due to the need to reverse the flow direction within the system, standard unidirectional filtration would not be sufficient to protect components from the ingested plastic.

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We updated all elements to Hy-Pro DFE Rated G8 Dualglass filter elements and installed PFHB bi-directional flow filter housings on each hydraulic line leading to and from the pump to isolate each component in case of a failure. With bidirectional filtration on both sides of the motors, a filter would capture all contamination traveling to and from the motor, preventing failures.

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These steps have reduced system failures by more than 50%. In once case, the debris cloud dumped into the hydraulic fluid during a pump failure was isolated by the filter elements inside the new PFHB filter assemblies. In all, our team saved the company over $60k compared to previous incidents where the motors would have been destroyed as well.