Rafe sits down with Peter Dufresne – Executive Vice President at EPT Clean Oil to discuss all things regarding varnish and varnish remediation.
Where can Ion Resin Exchange Filters be used? Ion exchange resin filters can be used wherever varnish is likely to be an issue, but the economics of the system lend itself to high-value industries in which critical equipment downtime results in significant revenue loss.
Rafe Britton: A question regarding deployment. Most resin filter technologies are associated with the turbine and power generation industry. They are commonly seen in steam and gas turbine applications. And that’s where a lot of the focus has been on varnish and varnish precursors.
Do you see this technology being more widely adopted in the other applications in the future? Perhaps miniaturised for use elsewhere? Or is it the nature of power generation that you’re dealing with such expensive assets, and high temperatures that it’s where most of the focus will remain?
Peter Dufresne: There’s some truth to that because of the value of the production equipment. It hurts more if you lose a million dollars a day than it does if you’re losing 10,000 dollars a day.
But I would say that if you move into hydraulic systems – some of these hydraulic systems used in general industrial applications are as sophisticated as what is in a power plant. The difference is the production value. If this machine experiences downtime, they can be very real and very acute problems depending on the facility.
So I would say that it’s not a miniaturisation of the technology that is required because it’s really proportional to volume. Industrial systems will have similarly sized equipment. The situation becomes how do we tune the technology and price the technology accordingly so that it works in that application.
I’m quite confident about the future in it. There are too many operating problems. Varnish is not just a problem for the power industry. Varnish is a problem with all lubricants used anywhere. And if you let those lubricants accumulate oxidation material past the point of saturation, you have solid varnish.
It’s that simple. If you keep the oil in an unsaturated state, you can’t have varnish and that’s what the exchange resins do. So the technology has broad applicability across industries with a variety of lubricants.