General Electric buys Stationary IV stripper

KMT has delivered a robotic waterjet cleaning system to General Electric's Engine Services facility in Strother, Kansas, for stripping thermal sprayed coatings from jet engine components.

Thermal coatings, made of ultra-fine grained metal alloys or ceramics, are applied to protect the base material of components exposed to heavy contact with other rotating parts.

The Engine Services division at Strother repairs, overhauls and performs general maintenance on new and used aircraft engine components.

The customised Stationary IV Stripping system supplied by KMT Robotic Solutions features an overhead rail-mounted ABB IRB-2400 robot with a KMT Rotojet cleaning head, Cleaningware software and a Streamline SL-V 100R Plus intensifier.

A search is mounted next to the Rotojet to ensure the part is in the cleaning area, as is an air nozzle to remove water from the part after it is stripped.

When refurbishing a thermal coated part, the team at GE Strother must first strip the original coating and then reapply it to its original thickness.

The KMT system replaced a 12-year-old waterjet stripping machine that used a closed loop filtering process to remove the stripped coatings.

GE wanted a replacement system that would eliminate the difficulty and associated costs of the closed-loop waste filtering process.

During closed-loop filtering, the water used to clean the part is continuously recycled through a series of costly filters.

John Segovia, special process engineer for GE Engine Services, said: 'Now we're only limited by the size of the cell and not by the type of part that needs to be stripped.' According to Mr Segovia, the new open-loop filtering system, which uses fresh water from the plant's water supply, has reduced water filter costs by 75 per cent.

Productivity and cycle time have also been improved, enabling GE Strother to process 25 per cent more parts than its previous capacity.

The company has also realised additional savings in training costs and uptime.

KMT's Cleaningware software improves human-to-machine communication and adjusts water pressure to minimise wear on the high-pressure tubes and hoses, making the system easy to program and operate.

Operators load parts into the system by hand or with the help of a telfer crane.

Once the part is loaded onto the rotating table, the operator scans a bar code that automatically calls up the correct stripping program.

The water used to strip the part is pumped through the cleaning nozzle at high pressure via a KMT Streamline SL-V 100R Plus intensifier.

KMT's cleaning/stripping systems are based on the company's Cutting Box systems for waterjet cutting and routing and offer efficient, fast and accurate removal of a range of surface coatings, greases and other substances, without damaging metal surfaces and other substrates.

KMT Robotic Solutions can supply customised systems based on the dimensions of the part to be machined, the number of parts to be cleaned, the required cycle times, the plant environment and to meet budget and running costs.

KMT's cleaning systems can be used for many applications, such as removing paint on fixtures used in curing ovens for automotive bodies, removing excess polyurethane and other plastics from injection mouldings and cleaning blades in refurbishment work on diesel turbines.

Typical applications include the removal of thermal barriers, dimensional spray, anti-fretting plasmaspray, abradables, scale and oxides, paint, glues, rubber-type coatings, carbonaceous deposits and radioactive coatings.

Back to top