Involvement with the sealing industry and ESA

After my graduation as a mechanical engineer, I started working as a R&D engineer in the steel industry. My involvement with the sealing industry started 27 years ago when I accepted an R&D position with Merkel (Later to become Burgmann Packing). I received good training by learning from experienced colleagues. My early involvement with the ESA helped me to get a better insight into issues such as legislation and standards. Also working together with other sealing experts helped me to gain a wider knowledge about different aspects of the industry.

After my training I moved the R&D facilities for packings to our manufacturing plant in Ireland. Despite being one of the oldest types of sealing devices, packings are a complex product. As a mechanical engineer I had to learn about different types of yarn materials, chemicals for the impregnations and the different complex steps of manufacturing the product.

In addition to the development side, I got involved with application engineering by supporting technical sales engineers worldwide when encountering difficulties or failures with end users. This provided knowledgeable input for new product development. The spectrum of applications is very wide. Dealing with rotary pumps with low pressures but higher shaft speeds to industrial plunger pumps with more than 3000 bar discharge pressures. Temperatures for sealing liquid nitrogen at -196 °C up to more than 1000 °C for static sealing of steel furnaces. In addition, there is a vast range of media from harmless fluids such as water to concentrated acids or alkaline solutions.

Besides the wide application range, other aspects such as environmental laws and standards, health & safety aspects and industry specific requirements made the development work interesting and challenging. Over the years in the industry the work with competitors and other experts in the ESA help me to gain a better understanding of all these subjects. With the ESA we were able to do work which individual companies on their own cannot do, such as the development of EN standard 16752 for pump packing testing or joint research projects like the friction study for pump packing applications.

This experience enabled me to take on the role of Technical Director for the ESA last year when the position came up. Again, it is challenging to evolve the organisation and support all the sealing Divisions in their work. The virus situation and the associated restrictions have also made it very difficult but we were able to set-up regular online meetings and continue with the project work. The development of training material, handbooks in different languages and information about standards and legislation issues has continued. Setting-up the Knowledge Base as an information database for anyone interested to learn about sealing devices is another step forward for the ESA. The Knowledge Base enables us to share the vast knowledge of all ESA members to help the sealing industry and their customers to develop in the future.

Ralf Vogel, ESA