TANK LINERS FOR HARD CHROME PLATING

Hard chrome plating solutions are notorious for breaking down tank liners at the area where solution and oxygen interact. This is because as the solution evaporates the fumes condensate back on the liner. That condensate is now at a concentration of chrome beyond which PVC can handle. This causes the liner to break down at this area while the rest of the liner that is under solution still has years of service life left.

The old answer was to put another layer of PVC to cover the upper and lower solution levels. However, this “skirt” is still PVC and still subject to the same attack as the liner. All a PVC skirt does is delay the problem rather than solve it.

Witt Lining Systems has innovated an answer that completely eliminates this problem and provides you with the full service life of the liner. Instead of making the “skirt” out of PVC, we make it from LFP CrossFilm™. LFP is a patented material that is 100% PTFE Teflon, but carries far greater mechanical strength than regular PTFE Teflon which makes it perfect for a skirting material. Being Teflon the material is chemically inert and therefore not subject to any breakdown. As a result you get the full service life of the liner which can be more than five times the service life of a liner without any skirt.

The real innovation in the LFP skirts are the fabrication techniques we employ to properly fasten the skirt to the liner. Because LFP cannot be welded directly to PVC we punch a series of holes in the LFP skirt and then place a strip of PVC over top the holes. We then weld that PVC strip to the PVC liner which traps the skirt into place.

Other liner manufactures stop their skirts at the top of the tank because they don’t have our fabrication techniques to bring the skirt onto the top of the flange. The result is that the PVC strip that holds their skirt in place is now sitting right in that evaporation area. The strip deteriorates, their skirt is floating in your tank, and you didn’t get the extended service life that an LFP skirt provides. A Witt Lining Systems’ LFP skirt will be attached to the liner up on the rim of the tank. This keeps the attachment strip from being exposed to the fumes of the solution and keeps the LFP skirt functioning as intended.

The other point to make is that if you are going to invest in an LFP skirt it makes sense to put it on the longest lasting material possible. This would be a heavy gauge Koroseal® PVC liner. No other material has the track record in chrome service that Koroseal has.

If you are in the hard chrome plating industry and you want the longest lasting tank liner you need to specify a Koroseal® PVC liner with an LFP CrossFilm™ skirt. You want the skirt to be wide enough to sit 1-2 inches below the lowest solution level of your tank, and you want that skirt to sit up on the rim of the tank so that no PVC is exposed to the fumes of the solution. This will provide you a liner that will give you years of service life and lower your overall operating costs.