Strainers Built to Withstand Seawater Corrosion

If you ever want to discover just how corrosive saltwater can get, try this little experiment for yourself: fill up a sand pail with water from the beach, dunk a standard metal dinner-fork in the pail, and then wait overnight. In the morning, you’re more than liable to see a fine coating of rust up and down the fork’s surface. In short, it doesn’t take an advanced degree in chemical engineering to realize that saltwater is a whole lot more corrosive than freshwater.

While freshwater corrodes metals at a relatively slow rate (after all, you’re not going to see rust on your forks and knives if you leave them overnight in a pan that’s brimming with regular tap-water), the sodium chloride in seawater acts as a catalyst and accelerator for rust-growth. Time and again, ships, berths, harbor cranes, and oil platforms have discovered this problem the hard way — seawater eats away at surfaces, eventually eroding them to the point where it intrudes into the proper functioning of seaborne electrical systems.

Think about the electric-powered infrastructure in America that gets exposed to ocean water day-in and day-out. Now, think about how the annual cost of seawater corrosion in the United States runs somewhere around $2.7 billion. It doesn’t take an economics degree to realize that’s a heap of money.

Many industrial basket strainer companies make a point of sounding overly technical about seawater corrosion. They’ll trot out various points of scientific terminology that let you know they’re well-versed about corrosion and its various effects on sundry materials. But from our standpoint, with all due respect, all of that’s just salesmanship and window dressing. We know our stuff here at Fluidtrol as well as anyone, but we also abide by the principle that when it comes to explaining science to our customers, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” You know who said that? Albert Einstein. If it’s good enough for Einstein, it’s good enough for us.

Since 1992, we’ve been in the business of fabricating basket strainers that fight the long-term corrosive effects of seawater. We’re especially geared towards providing steel structures exposed to seawater with the means to protect their electrical functioning. Our laminate construction aquatic strainers can be made, if needed, to conform to ASME codes for non-metallic pressure vessels. Likewise, our stainless strainers are fabricated from SCH 10 304 stainless steel and possess the same attributes and features. We know what it takes to build a substantive product that lasts the long-haul against saltwater.

Finally, we have a new product, our large FRP basket strainers for corrosive fluids, which boast a pressure rating of 150 PSI and provide the perfect solution for seawater-exposed applications such as desalinization and seawater HVAC systems.

We know the right steps to take and the dos and don’ts. In other words, we know corrosion like the back of your fork.