Rotork Australia has completed a comprehensive “turnkey” actuation retrofit project to improve flood capacity at a water supply reservoir in central Victoria. Rotork’s contract involved the replacement of worn out gearboxes and braking mechanisms on ten spillway gates at Lauriston Reservoir with IQ actuators and Rotork Gears gearboxes. Maintenance inspections revealed that the gearboxes were in poor condition with worn gears and braking mechanisms. The overhaul costs would be very high. At the same time a risk assessment carried out on the operation of the gates concluded that, in addition to Occupational Health and Safety risks, the gates could not be opened quickly enough to achieve maximum flood capacity and therefore the spillway capacity of the reservoir itself was reduced. A faster, more reliable and less physically demanding solution was required. Rotork Australia offered IQ25, 24rpm actuators fitted to Rotork Gears MTW8 (120:1 ratio) gearboxes, with new mounting frames designed to use the original gearbox fixing points, eliminating the need for any structural modification. As part of the “turnkey” project the actuators were fitted with vandal resistant covers. Actuator installation was completed on schedule and commissioning was performed using a Pocket PC with Rotork Pocket Insight software. A Pocket Insight equipped PC was also used to download the actuators’ data logger files for torque monitoring following test operations.
