M-Coating, the shaft coating system with ERCELIT-KS1, has been installed in Charlestown in Cornwall, England, to stabilise and protect large shafts and to ensure that the environment has long term protection against effluent.
Operating on behalf of Edmund Nuttall, contractors for South West Water, PERCO coated 6 shafts with a total area of about 130 square meters. These shafts measured up to 7.5 m deep and varied in section from round through oval to rectangular. Shafts varied in profile and size along their depth, sometimes up to 2m in diameter as seen in Figure 1.
Faced with the challenge of renovating this sewage installation PERCO opted for the M-Coating system, which has a variety of certifications and has been used in England since 1998 with ever increasing success.
HERMES Technologie provided PERCO with the support of an experienced operator, which meant that the contract was successfully completed in only two days.
Article continues below…The TSSR is adjusted to the shaft’s diameter and then automatically power-jets the shaft walls in two successive passes, at an average speed of 10 cm per min – see Figure 2. This provides a stable substrate for the subsequent coating process. The soundness of the substrate is tested with a rebound hammer before ERGELIT is applied. The thickness of the layers applied is checked and confirmed as correct, or the thickness of the coating is modified.
At Cornwall, everything went according to plan and after the shafts had been successfully cleaned, an even coating of 10 mm of ERGELIT-KS1 was quickly applied by centrifugal spray. The spray head, rotating at 500 rpm, is lowered and raised in an even and continuous movement until the desired thickness is achieved.
The ERGELIT dry mortar is mixed automatically to a smooth consistency in the M-Coating appliance and pumped at 8 litres per minute to the spray head. The hoist’s steady high speed of 4 m/min gives a coating with an even, orange-peel surface without any unwanted rings as seen in Figure 3. Due to the rapid reaction time of this environmentally-friendly mortar, shafts can be entered after only one hour.
When the next film was being shot in Charlestown in the first week in August, nobody had any idea of what had been going on there only a few days before. The site had been cleared up, the shaft covers replaced and only the local residents still recall PERCO’s highly successful performance.
