Testimonials - Pipe Extrusion

Scott L. is Production Manager for a pipe extrusion plant. He relies on SuperNova HT to clean piping dies. Here, he describes its use:

We run HDPE pipe. Our dies range from 4 inch on up to 24 inch. It's almost all black but we do have carbon issues. Part of the problem is, with everything being black we don't see the carbon right away and it builds up. Sometimes a die can build up so much carbon that chunks break loose and block up the die.

When we tear down a big die for cleaning, it can take six or eight hours and cost us well upwards of $1,000. So we were looking for something that would let us clean up a die without the teardown.

A while back we brought in a couple hundred pounds of SuperNova HT and tried it out on a pretty badly carboned up 12 inch die. We got the die up to 500 degrees and used about 75 pounds of purge. After we let it soak for about half an hour we ran it out and got a whole lot of carbon out. It was cleaned well enough for us to put it into production without doing a teardown. The whole process took under two hours and we didn't have to get the maintenance guys involved.

Not too long after that, we got some pretty severe die lines on our 24 inch pipe. We decided to try the SuperNova HT before tearing apart the die. It took a while to get the heat up, but the purge worked for us. We took out a lot of carbon and the die lines cleaned up. Nobody was looking forward to tearing that die apart so we were pretty pleased with the outcome.

We plan to keep SuperNova HT on hand from now on for these situations.