Pumping corrosive fluids can potentially damage your pump equipment over time, causing failures and leaks and creating hazardous conditions for your staff and facilities that negatively impact production performance, increasing maintenance costs and posing a risk to your products, team, and facilities.
There are environmental, operational, and safety regulations overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Transportation (DoT), and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to be considered involving the transfer of corrosive materials, and the pump equipment and processes that facilitate them, depending on the type of substances.
Pump corrosion occurs from chemical reactions between the pumped fluid and exposed metal surfaces which causes the metal to degrade. A metal’s corrosion rate, usually measured in mils per year or MPY, in contact with a given fluid will largely determine its service life as a choice for pump materials of construction in a given application. Low rates of metal corrosion generally lead to years-long service life of castings and components. Many chemicals are not particularly corrosive and can be pumped using industry-standard materials like 316SS, cast steel, or even ductile or cast iron, but more aggressive chemicals will corrode these standard materials too quickly. In order to achieve acceptable service life, it is necessary to use more corrosion-resistant alloys that are higher in nickel, chromium, molybdenum, or even titanium, such as Alloy 20, Hastelloy, duplex stainless steels like CD4 or 2205, or super duplex alloys like 2507. These exotic alloys can be significantly more expensive with longer lead times than standard materials, because the materials are non-stocked and made-to-order.
This is why Fybroc manufactures fiberglass reinforced composite pumps. Fiberglass pumps are not susceptible to rust and oxidation, and they are safe and effective at transferring a broad range of corrosive fluids, including acids, brines, caustics, bleaches, solvents, chlorinated or demineralized water, seawater, and waste liquids.
The near-zero corrosion rate of fiberglass composite means that fiberglass pump castings and parts will last as long as or even outlast exotic alloys by a meaningful margin, typically providing decades of service life in the most difficult of applications. When you choose Fybroc pumps and parts made from readily available standard fiberglass composite over a made-to-order exotic alloy pump, you are likely to benefit from not only the lowest first-cost coupled with highly competitive lead times, but also the lowest total cost of ownership to operate and maintain the pump over its useful life. In fact, the more aggressive the chemical, the higher the required grade of exotic alloy, the quicker the payback of instead using long-lasting corrosion-resistant fiberglass pumps.
Fybroc, the first company to develop a fiberglass reinforced pump back in 1966, has continued to focus exclusively on producing the highest quality non-metallic fiberglass composite pumps for more than 50 years.
Fybroc’s unique and robust fiberglass pump designs are produced using components made from the Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) process. Parts are molded from layers of precision-cut, continuous, long-strand fiberglass mats, which are manually loaded into die molds. These are then injected with catalyzed resin. After the resin gels, the part is removed from the mold and cured at ambient temperature before being post-cured in a controlled heat operation to ensure quality.
RTM is superior to the compression-molding of parts with chopped glass, which is used by some other manufacturers because the use of continuous-strand fiberglass mat achieves a uniform, high-strength part composition which has consistent physical properties. When loading the die mold, Fybroc focuses carefully on high-stress areas such as flanges and gussets. In fact, Fybroc pumps possess arguably the highest glass loading ratios in the industry. High glass density coupled with the use of a high-purity resin system ensures maximum consistency and strength of parts without voids or fillers. As a result, RTM enables the use of thinner-walled pump casings without sacrificing strength.
Because the individual components are made from solid fiberglass, Fybroc pumps avoid some limitations of polymer-lined non-metallic designs, including polymer liner permeation, delamination, and puncture, leading to corrosion of the underlying armored casing or other lined components like magnet assemblies (in the case of magnetic-drive lined pumps) as well as external surface corrosion of armored casings, which are usually ductile iron, as paint or coating systems degrade.
Fybroc manufactures their own fiberglass components, enabling them to provide highly competitive lead times, and their pumps are highly customizable, using a range of interchangeable parts to adapt to widely diverse industrial applications.
Fybroc also manufactures a highly reliable and carefully designed range of vertical sump pumps for corrosive sump applications, available in any material configuration and featuring maintenance-friendly design details, such as externally serviceable split-sleeve bearings and reversible pump columns which effectively doubles the life of the column.
The company uses Dow DERAKANE series, epoxy vinyl ester resin, which when properly formulated and cured, complies with FDA regulations (21 CFR 177.2420) to safely be used in food and beverage industry applications.
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