With a slew of federally mandated initiatives in the pipeline, the U.S.'s energy backbone still relies on equipment that must follow the rules coined by Euler, Newton, Carnot and the like.
The rules are changing, but physics is physics.
And yet, industrial equipment is often ill-suited to the applications it spends its days doing. Pumps, turbines and compressors are often undersized in critical applications or so oversized that running them violates targets for energy consumption. Almost any piece of equipment that can be purchased, particularly rotating equipment, has a design point or a best efficiency point that, when deviated from, results in higher energy consumption, higher vibration and reduced reliability. A bad-actors list in any kind of plant is often only part of the story.
As Henry David Thoreau said, "Never look back, unless you are planning to go that way." Globally, we are advancing at a blistering pace. From the digitization of the modern refinery using IoT and augmented reality, to the online nature of the newly minted work-from-home culture, the plants of the future will need to learn fast, act fast and have a constantly updated definition of the right answers to complex problems. It only makes sense that the very equipment monitored with this technology sees a commensurate advancement.
Conhagen Inc. is primarily known as a rotating equipment repair company, specializing in horizontal and vertical centrifugal pumps of almost any size. Additionally, Conhagen services steam turbines, compressors, blowers, positive-displacement pumps and gearboxes, as well as housing a full computer numerical control machine shop in La Marque, Texas, and manual machine shops in Kenner, Louisiana, and Benicia, California. In the plethora of rotating equipment, Conhagen has not seen it all, but has seen the most.
What Conhagen is less known for is its engineering department, which is staffed by a small team with a combined 60 years of experience. While the team has slowly grown, its skillset has gone from hydraulic and mechanical design expertise to vibration analysis and rotordynamics, precision metrology and reverse engineering, and root cause failure analyses.
As advances in engineering tools are made, Conhagen is ready to adapt, learn and implement solutions to old and new problems. Recently, Conhagen began using AxSTREAM, a best-in-class solution for the design of turbomachinery in axial and radial machines. Conhagen's engineers can develop in-house tools for most problems, but there is value in recognizing when better tools exist and when to use them.
One of the signature philosophies Conhagen has developed in its 79 years is that the customer truly owns the equipment, designs and all of the pertinent information that accompanies the equipment's proper function and troubleshooting. At the completion of a job, the engineering reports, calculations, manufacturing drawings, assembly drawings and models, and inspection reports are all submitted to the customer for their records.
This breaks from traditional thinking, but when your equipment goes into service and becomes the object of focus for engineers or operators, these individuals should be able to pull reports on how the equipment assembles and operates. Conhagen's lines are always open, but the company believes there is value for customers to understand their own equipment and be able to troubleshoot it independently.
Dedication to service
Whether problems require standard fixes per API; customer repair specification; or unique, one-off solutions, Conhagen's engineering team can take the idea from conception to commissioning. Conhagen's manufacturing capabilities line up to the best in the business, and its experience in power systems and utilities, refining and chemical plants allows its workers to make informed decisions with customers about the equipment that keeps them moving.
For more information, visit www.conhagen.com or call (409) 938-4226.
