Without missing a beat, Willy Roman and his coatings team have made the transition into their new 37,000 sq/ft building just 150 yards west of our primary 60,000 sq/ft 1401 facility.

We can’t perform a 24-hour wet tape adhesion in 13 hours, but our extensive production capacity allows us to manage lead times and quality helping you meet your customers’ most stringent demands.

Check out our new capabilities:

Spray Booths

• (2) 10’ x 15’ High Production Spray Booths
• (3) 6’ x 6’ Low Volume Precision Detail Booth

Certified Ovens With Eurotherm Digital Oven Controls and Paperless Oven Data Collection

• (2) 10’ x 8’ 800F AMS 2750D, Class 2, Type A, +/- 10F

• (2) 4’ x 3’ 750F AMS 2750D, Class 2, Type A, +/- 10F

• (1) 4’ x 8’ 500F AMS 2750D, Class 2, Type A, +/- 10F

Coating Materials

We have an extensive inventory of certified coating materials.

• Dry Film Lube – Thermal and Air Cured
• MIL Spec Prime / Paint
• CARC
• Integral Fuel Tank Coatings
• Permanent Resin Coating
• Teflon
• Modified PTFE’s
• Powder Coating
• Bell Blue Coat
• Kynar

– Climate controlled masking room staffed with over 15 precision masking technicians.

– Vapor Degreasing – n-propyl bromide (environmentally safe)

Our Welding and Brazing Departments are relocating to 1225 Greenleaf… More about it in the next e-Mag!

Click here to download this article as a printable PDF

System handles multiple process streams, fits tight footprint

By Jim Destefani, Editor, pfonline.com

Magnetic Inspection Labo­ratory Inc. (MIL; Elk Grove Village, IL) has been around for quite a while—since 1942, to be precise. As the name suggests, the company began life as a non-destructive testing (NDT) house, providing magnetic particle, liquid penetrant, X-ray and other inspection services to customers in the aerospace and defense industries.

Since then both the company and its range of services have expanded considerably. MIL still offers NDT capabilities, and its customer list still reads like a Who’s Who of aerospace and military primes including The Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., Bell Helicopter, Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. and Bombardier Inc. But over the years the company has gotten into the metal finishing business in a big way. MIL now operates multiple anodizing lines in addition to providing black oxide, chemical conversion coating for aluminum, chemical milling, electropolish­ing, pickling, etching, glass bead and abrasive blasting, passivation, Teflon impregnation, and zinc and manganese phosphating services in addition to liquid paint, Teflon coatings and dry film lubricants.

MIL’s most recent push has been into electroplating. Accord­ing to laboratory manager Corey Richardson, the company recently completed an expansion program that allowed it to add Type IC anodizing and cadmium cyanide electroplating processes to its capabilities list.

“Metal finishing accounts for more than half the business now,” Richardson says, “We just started plating this year. We provide type I, II and III anodizing in addition to Type IC anodizing. Type IC anod­izing is a more environmentally friendly substitute for chromic acid anodizing.”

Coming online now is cadmium cyanide plating, a reflection of MIL’s continued focus on military and aerospace applications. “Some of our managers had experience with cadmium plating, and with other platers getting out of the business and the military not having an alternative to cadmium in place, we thought we could pick up some of the slack,” Richardson explains. “We’ve completed our testing on the cad plating line and are just starting to get orders.”

Handling Wastewater

When it came time to plan a waste­water treatment system for MIL’s new plating capabilities, managers had two priorities. Obviously, the system had to efficiently handle waste streams from a wide variety of processes. The second criterion involved the floor space available for the system.

“The space allotted for wastewater treatment was 25 × 80 ft,” Richard­son recalls. “To say the system was shoehorned in there doesn’t quite do it justice.”

MIL checked out several poten­tial wastewater treatment vendors before selecting a design developed by J & T Technologies (Pottstown, PA). “We felt the J & T system handled high solids loadings better than other systems that were pro­posed, and they worked with us to fit everything into that tight space,” Richardson explains.

Nominally sized to treat 120 gpm of mixed waste, the system features a duplex microfiltration system consisting of two independent subsystems, each capable of pro­ducing 120 gpm of filtrate. Each filter subsystem contains 24, 6-inch diameter • 6 ft long membrane modules, and each module has 10, 1-inch ID PVDF tubes with 15 ft² of membrane surface.

The duplex setup enables one side of the microfilter system to be cleaned or undergo other mainte­nance while the other side handles all of MIL’s filtration requirements. It uses membranes from Duraflow LLC (Tewksbury, MA) that are said to produce 40% more filtrate per square foot than competitive membranes, and MIL has discov­ered that the waster treatment system is capable of outperforming its rated capacity by a significant margin. “When the system is at its cleanest, we have hit as high as 215 gpm operating just one side,” Richardson says. The system con­sistently handles 160–180 gpm of wastewater, he adds.

According to J & T, the microfil­tration system removes precipitated metals better than, for example, a clarifier system. As with any pre­treatment system prior to solids removal, chrome is reduced, cyanide is oxidized, and the pH is adjusted to the point of mini­mum solubility for the metal mix. Insoluble metals are then removed by the filters’ 0.1-μm physical barrier without long chain poly­mers, eliminating concerns about particle size, density, electrostatic charge or the chance of overflow­ing to drain. Sludge volume is also greatly reduced, and the filtrate can in many cases be used for non-critical rinsing.

Richardson says MIL maintains the microfiltration system by clean­ing the system every one to two weeks and using activated carbon to minimize fouling of filter mem­branes by organics, surfactants and silicates. “Surfactants and silicates are probably our biggest prob­lems in terms of contaminants,” he explains. “We tried calcium chloride first as a less expensive alternative, but it just didn’t work as well—after a while we just had too many surfactants in the stream. Now we add about a bag of carbon a day, and it binds up the surfac­tants and effectively eliminates the problem.”

Combined with the rest of the wastewater treatment system, microfiltration provides levels of metal contaminants that are con­sistently well below requirements. MIL monitors metals levels in the waste stream daily using atomic absorption spectrometry. Typical results are listed in the table.

Waste Treatment Process

Up to microfiltration, MIL’s waste treatment process is fairly conventional. Incoming flows are segregated into separate tanks that hold concentrates, rinse waters, cadmium cyanide and chrome-bearing wastewaters.

“We knew we were adding cadmium plating, so that was definitely part of the planning for the waste treatment system,” Richardson says. “It was designed for batch treatment, handling chrome and cadmium cyanide separately and then enabling us to commingle the flows after treat­ment. The system was installed in November 2008.”

All acid and alkaline waste streams that don’t contain cyanide or chrome enter a 6,500-gal equal­ization tank. Cyanide-bearing wastes flow into a 1,600-gal tank, and chromium-containing wastes are pumped to a 2,000-gal tank.

Concentrates are handled by batch treatment and cyanides are destroyed in a typical three-stage oxidation method. After primary precipitation, chrome-bearing waste gets pumped into a reduc­tion tank where pH is dropped and Oxidation-Reduction Potential (ORP) adjusted.

MIL recycles some of the alka­line waste from its chemi­cal milling operations by using it in place of a proprietary precipitant for metals. “It’s highly alkaline with a high sul­fide content, and we add it to the system upstream of the microfilters to aid in precipitating metals prior to filtration,” Rich­ardson explains.

Flows from the chrome and cyanide treatment systems com­mingle with the rest of the waste stream, which is subjected to pH neu­tralization, coagulation, and precipitation. The commingled flow is then pumped through the microfiltration system. From the microfilter, clear effluent is pumped to drain. Solids gener­ated by microfiltration are allowed to settle in a thickening tank before being pumped to a filter press. Filter cake is sent to landfill as hazardous waste.

According to Richardson, the system has handled all the waste streams generated by MIL’s array of processes and significantly reduced the company’s output of hazardous wastes. “Previously, we operated a separate chromium treatment system, and we sent out most of our concentrated waste as hazardous,” he explains.

For information from J & T Tech­nologies, phone 610-326-4771 or go to jtequip.com. For information from Duraflow, phone 978-851-0447 or go to duraflow.biz.

LEARN MORE:
Wiping Out Waste
For tips on choosing a wastewater treatment system, go to pfonline.com/articles/120701.html

To download a PDF of this article, click here.

Cadmium Plating, a recent addition to MIL’s expansive offering of aerospace processes, is open for business!

Our closed-loop environmental management system exceeds current and proposed regulatory requirements to assure you of a reliable and compliant Cadmium Plating supplier for years to come.

In support of Cadmium Plating, our enhanced capabilities include the following:

Read the entire article as a PDF.