Ask the Experts – October 23, 2024
Welcome everyone to another USI Tech Talk. Today we are doing another “Ask the Experts” where you can bring your interesting problems, and we will do a review on what we would do to fix those. And if we don’t get any, then we will go over some of the most interesting ones we have had for the past couple of weeks.
Situation 1 – Nick Cliff
The customer has an oil / water separator tank. There is oil leaching up the side of the tank, and you can see that it is saturated into the concrete. And they are looking for a way to put a coating on this concrete tank. With the oil in there, it will be very difficult for anything to stick. So they came to Nick with a problem and sent a few pictures, and we are wondering what they could possibly come up with.
The tank is holding water and oil and it separates the two. But there wasn’t a coating on the concrete before, and the oil has saturated into the concrete. If you just go in there and lightly abrade the surface, you’re likely to have oil penetrating the concrete back through, and you are not going to have any adhesion with any type of coating you put on there, whatever chemical protective coating you decide to use. It doesn’t matter what you use; it just isn’t going to stick. Looking to coat the whole tank, yes, the side and the bottom. No temperature concerns, open to the atmosphere. No pressure, just the pressure of the water on the walls. Most of the time it will be submerged. UV will not take an issue at all.
Situation 2 – Bobby Clemens
Customer, who has a steel pipe that was poorly coated, high pressure steel pipe. It was poorly coated, and it has an anomaly along the side, and he doesn’t want to have to take off all the coating, reblast clean, and then recoat. The client was wondering if we had some sort of solution that would be able to help with that. The client didn’t have a size for the anomaly size available.
These are great examples of how the team are able to take their customers to the next level and to empower them to say “Look here is something that should do what it needs to do” . Unconventional Solutions will give you, the customer, all the tools and ammunition allowing them the choice on “not having to think”. The beauty of working with us, is having our sales and technical staff being able to diagnose these issues, and then empower their customers to make recommendations and specifications. We might ask a lot of questions, but these questions are important for the big important repairs, and we want to make sure everyone is safe before, during and after the repair.
