Kingfield recently experienced another 1^st for the Australian Galvanizing Industry. We ran our first pre-treatment zone cleaning & desludging for the new plant. The ‘first’ of anything is always the ‘great unknown’, however the process and the results offered key learnings and highlighted some great advantages of operating a facility like ours.

The process required over 1.3 million litres of chemicals to be transferred between tanks over a 4-day period to clean and de-sludge 4 pre-treatment tanks. With over 75,000 litres of onsite storage, the process was completed efficiently and without any cross contamination. The cleaning process produced 30% less sludge than the same process in a Traditional Galvanizing plant and can be completed in three days versus three weeks in the old plant.

With all transfers completed, chemical tanks refilled and rejuvenated one day prior to production commencing, our tanks were fully heated and ready for production the following day at 6am. Significantly, this was the first cleaning and de-sludging activity in two and half years of operation and while we may change that frequency for some tanks in the future, a key learning was how efficiently the process can take place when the time is right.

Our CEO, Steve Laussen praised the team for a fantastic result. Good planning, risk management and a dedicated team contributed to the success of this operation, which was completed with zero incidents to people, plant or environment.