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Hi Folks,
It has been a while since I have required your assistance.
We were monitoring the above compressor when it catastrophically failed at 13 months from new.(No Warrantee)
Disappointingly all we are getting from the service agent is "Oh that is tough, we have the parts in stock.
Prior to failure from commissioning we were noting a few to light amount of fine bronze and silver coloured metallic abrasive wear particles being defoliated in the oil samples. This wear debris was all too large for spectrographic analysis to detect and the compressors 5 µm oil filter and the high flow of lubricant was maintaining the particle count around the ISO 15/12 to 16/12 which is reasonable and this combined with a $10K oil and refrigerant change or a $1500 filter change there was not enough evidence to justify the expense of an oil or filter change.
We have root caused the failure mode and it appears poor quality servicing and design is the cause and we are wondering if there is a history of these compressors being damaged in this manner and if so maybe we could gather just how many have failed as this is the second failure on this site, previous was 10 years before and we were not privy to obtaining that failures damaged components as we have in this instance.
If none of you are aware of any other failures in the AquaEdge® 19XR/XRV/XRE Water-Cooled Centrifugal Chiller Compressors that’s OK we will handle this here but if there are other failures we would like to be aware of them.
and if so we can provide the information to root cause those failures to ascertain if the failure mode is the same. The failure in this instance was the impeller moved forward and down and fouled the shroud.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Regards Rob S