Wear-resistant high-performance plastic KALEA protects bucket elevator housing

A leading cement plant operates a bucket elevator as a conveyor to lift raw meal to the raw meal grinding mill. The plates that form the bucket elevator enclosure are made of Hardox. The buckets dump out the mixture as they reverse direction inside the bucket elevator. In so doing, part of the coarse, moist raw meal with a grain size of up to 5 mm trickles down into the bucket elevator housing, causing considerable abrasive wear and corrosion.

Kalenborn coated the individual steel plates of the bucket elevator housing with the sprayable polyurea KALEA, thereby reducing abrasive and impact wear as well as corrosion. Operating reliability was increased and the service life of the housing was extended. KALEA also abates noise. To meet the customer’s demand for less plant maintenance downtime by eliminating wear and corrosion, Kalenborn used its modern spraying technology to apply a 4-mm-thick coat of KALEA to the separate 6-mm-thick plates of the housing. The plate dimensions are 2000 x 1000 x 12000 mm and they have a total surface area of approx. 75 m². To ensure good adhesion, the interior of the housing plates was sand-blasted and the exterior was primed.

KALEA is a wear-resistant high-performance polyurea-based plastic that exhibits excellent wear resistance with high rebound resilience. The weather-resistant and temperature-resistant surface protection also provides noise insulation. KALEA is sprayed on seamlessly and cures very rapidly. After a very brief shutdown, the bucket elevator housing was restored to service.