With longwall equipment becoming more sophisticated and powerful, a continuous push for increase in performance, in output, and even more in safety, the mining industry is faced daily with the inherent limits of the staple lock design due to damage or corrosion.
Gates has developed a new safer coupling, the iLok™ coupling. The iLok™ coupling is a threaded design. The flat, wide spaced threads resist seizing. To connect the fitting, the nut on the male end is hand-tightened onto the female and, drawing the sealing surface under the seal in the female.
As the seal pack is in the inside surface of the female fitting where it is less subject to accidental damage, while the sealing surface of the male is also protected by the swivel.
The iLok™ is quite simple to understand and to use as people are familiar with tightening a nut to make a hydraulic connection. However, unlike nuts on threaded fittings, the iLok™ does not require torque to create preload and assure a good, consistent seal.
To secure the connection, a cable or other locking device is inserted into the holes in the nut trough grooves in the female and locked. The cable will not pass through the groove unless the nut is completely tightened. The cable also provides positive proof of a secure connection and keeps the nut from backing off during operation. For disconnecting the coupling, the cable is cut and removed so the nut can be loosened by hand. The back of the swivel nut is provided with slots so a spanner wrench can be used in case an extra tool is needed to loosen the coupling.
The ease to connect and disconnect is a key element to improve both safety and productivity. iLok™ can save hundreds of man-hours on every longwall move since the average disconnect time per coupling can be reduced up to 90% compared to staple lock. No tools are needed to engage or disengage the iLok™ coupling, so workers will not be tempted to use hammers or chisels as they often do to remove staple-lock fittings.
The iLok™ coupling is also compact, roughly the diameter of a standard staple-lock coupling without the staple and significantly more compact once the staple is in place. Not having the sharp ends of the protruding staple will additional avoid damage and abrasion of neighbouring assemblies and parts.
To further improve the lifetime of iLokTM assemblies in highly corrosive environments, iLok couplings are plated with Gates TuffCoat ™ Extreme® coating. TuffCoat ™ Extreme® offers 840 hours of red rust protection under ISO 9227 salt spray conditions, which means more than 10times better than the 72-hours requirement in given standard. The coupling has not only been tested at 420 bar pressure for 300.000 impulse cycles as applicable in mining ratings for static applications, it is additionally also tested to 1 million impulse cycles at 133% of 350 bar working pressure for hydraulic application standards.
For more press information contact:
Patricia Vauzelle
+ 49 241 5108 268
