News: AESSEAL's big deal

Rotherham company, AESSEAL, has proven its credentials as one of the UK's leading manufacturers by delivering one of their biggest ever orders.

Giant seals, some of the largest AESSEAL has ever produced, are beginning their work combating the elements in the extreme environment of one of South America's largest mines.

The order for 33 Super Duplex Alloy seals was one of the award-winning firm's biggest, in terms of size and weight, and worth in total about £630,000, almost US$1m.

AESSEAL's guiding principles of innovation and customer service were certainly put to the test as teams at the Global Technology Centre at Templeborough were set a tough challenge. They needed to design and manufacture the 33 bespoke seals, each with a shaft diameter of 11.625 inches – 295.275mm – and weighing 231.49lb – 105kg, within a delivery target of eight weeks.

The size of the seals meant that some components took up to eight hours each on nine- and five-axis machines but the teams still achieved their targets and verification-tested the seals to a degree double what they would be subjected to in the field.

And having done that, they went the extra mile – actually, well over a thousand miles – air-freighting the first batch across the Atlantic so that the US customer could have a head start in fitting them to the pumps it was building for the end-user, while the rest followed by sea. Sheer weight (in total, almost 3.5 tonnes, 3,465kg) meant not all could go by air.

Ian Smedley, commercial manager at AESSEAL (whose main responsibility is, appropriately, "Large Projects"), said: "The guys did an amazing job and the whole team worked together to ensure unparalleled delivery of a very highly engineered product.

"For reasons of commercial confidentiality we won't identify the end-user, but this is mining on an enormous scale, where they are increasing the size of the pumps to accommodate the scale of the operation.

"As a business we are seeing a trend towards higher efficiencies and increased production capacity. The size of these seals is indicative of the trend in this sector. AESSEAL is constantly developing our product portfolio to meet this type of customer's increasing demands."

AESSEAL website

Images: AESSEAL