Jul 23 2009
Manual Airblast Rooms are an essential product in the extensive line of environmentally-sound blast systems offered by Wheelabrator. Airblast rooms are available with a variety of options to meet the specific needs of customers within any given sector, in particular the wind power industry. Rooms are engineered to work within existing facility sites and meet all material handling requirements; ensuring the highest level of reliability, productivity and cost-effectiveness.
The size of sections used in manufacturing wind towers present great challenges for surface preparation. As corrosion protection is of paramount importance, the large plate steel fabrications that form the tower sections must be cleaned, profiled, primed and painted before final assembly.
Wheelabrator Airblast rooms can be configured for "In-Out" or pass through work flow, where the tower sections are re-blasted in custom-built airblast rooms with the right amount of filtered and re-circulated ventilation air to allow good operator visibility and to prevent dust exfiltration to the plant environment. Wind tower sections are transported by special carriers into the blast room where both interior and exterior surfaces are blasted. The media left inside the blasted sections can be removed using a vacuum recovery system. The media that has fallen through the grated airblast room recovery floor gravitates into the screw conveyor system and is directed to the abrasive recovery module where it is cleaned, classified and returned to the blast generator to allow uninterrupted continuation of the blast process.
Wind tower sections (due to their width, height and length) dictate that the painting process is performed in larger paint halls. With this production need in mind, Wheelabrator has developed large paint rooms specific to Wind Tower section coating. The paint rooms utilize a specific air distribution technique which ensures good ventilation of the working area and a significant reduction of installed air movement equipment, heating energy consumption, and thus, operating costs. Similar to blasting, approximately 50 to 70 percent of paint work is carried out inside the welded sections. After the painting process is completed, the facility can be switched over to the drying process.
Wheelabrator has developed the latest technology available for wind tower applications with customer service and support that is critical to the successful implementation and operation of such processes.