Better Than New After 40 Years’ Service
Back in 1968, the then publicly owned East German company VEB Pumpenwerke Halle – now KSB – gave the city of Halle a pump to operate its famous fountain with its more than 60 m high water jet on Peißnitz island.
Reinstallation of the upgraded fountain pump at the Peißnitz pumping station.
The pump, an SGUR, did what pumps do as dependably as clockwork until it was removed last December after close to 40 years’ service.
For a pump of its age, it was still in surprisingly good condition when KSB Service GmbH started working on it. All the service specialists had to replace were a number of wear parts, for example gaskets, shaft protecting sleeves and casing wear rings. The casing components were sandblasted and fitted with an interior coating to make them hydraulically smooth.
Put to the test on the test bay at the Halle factory, the efficiency of the reassembled pump proved to have improved by 4 percentage points compared with its performance at the time it started service 40 years ago. With an efficiency of more than 80 percent at duty point, the veteran is as energy-efficient as today s pump generation.
In the future, the pump unit will be operated with a modern pump control and a variable speed system using a frequency inverter. The added equipment will enable the operators to vary the height of the fountain according to the time of day and wind conditions, and brings operating costs down considerably.
After being reinstalled on 26 May of this year, the old fountain pump was recommissioned on 11 June with more than 3000 Halle citizens present to celebrate the occasion. The pump is expected to run for at least another thirty years.
Source: KSB SE & Co. KGaA
