An Interview with David C. Orlowski, founder of Inpro/Seal and inventor of the bearing isolator.

CEO and founder of Inpro/Seal Company, David C. Orlowski has spent the last 41 years and counting working on ways to enhance and extend the service life of rotating equipment. The inventor of the bearing isolator, he is well known for his knowledge of bearings, bearing protection and tribology.

Recently, a journalist conducted a one-on-one interview with Dave where he covered many aspects of the bearing isolator and the organization he built around his invention.

For the next couple of months we will bring you excerpts from this interview. This month, Dave talks about how the bearing isolator was invented, the evolution of this invention, the early years, the importance of the Sears Tower in downtown Chicago and even how he named his company.

Was the bearing isolator business your first business?
No, we were originally in the pump distribution business. In addition to selling pumps, we repaired them on site and in our shop.

Originally you were a pump distributor?
Yes. Before that I also spent a few years with Worthington Pump and Machinery Corporation as a direct employee. Then that evolved into a distributorship.

The Bearing Isolator, what is it?
We invented the bearing isolator because we recognized a need for something better than rubber lip seals in pumps. We couldn't call our new device a seal because people would get it confused with a mechanical face seal that was used on the liquid end of pumps. Therefore, we avoided the term "seal" and came up with the term "bearing isolator". The word itself was not in existence at that point in time. We started using the designation bearing isolator and people would think it was an insulator. It was quite and educational program going on just about the name. We tried to get the name "bearing isolator" trademarked but the patent and trademark office (PTO) said it was too descriptive, so therefore it could not be trademarked.

If one would go to the patent office right now, how many patents would your name be on?
Over 50 US patents and of course most of them are foreign protected.

Is it under bearing protection at the patent office?
I really don't know. Probably, generically, it would be under labyrinth seal. We could go beyond that and call it a compound labyrinth seal.

What caused you to come up with this product?
I was working as a pump distributor and pump repair facility. We were called out by the manufacturer, Worthington Corporation, to repair some of the HVAC pumps in the Sears Tower in Chicago. This was in February of 1975. Now you wouldn't think that they would be having trouble with their air conditioning at that time, but they did. It was on the south side of the building. Those areas on the south side of the building were supposed to be cooled because of the intense daytime sun load. As it turns out, one of the chilled water pumps failed and there went the cooling system. The top floors started to overheat which caused large windows to pop out and fall onto the street. One of the local radio personalities working in the Chicago area, a guy by the name of Wally Phillips, picked up on the falling windows problem that the Sears Tower was having and that it had to be fixed so that the building could be occupied. The conditions were so, that we had to go up to the 22nd floor where all the equipment was. The pumps that were installed were API refinery type. It was a Worthington model HN.

Were you personally working on the pumps?
Yes, I was there. The pumps were installed for cost reasons, competitive reasons, with rubber lip seals. They were refinery pumps with rubber lip seals, which is a rarity. It shouldn't have been done, but it was. One of the single spring mechanical seals started to spray water and of course the water was coming out of the seal and going right through and under the lip seal, which was worn. It went through there and into the bearing housing, causing bearing failure and a catastrophic wreck. We were told directly by the Worthington Corporation to take the pumps apart, bring them down the freight elevator, put them into our pickup truck and proceed to install a new type of seal in the bearing frames of the pumps. There were 16 of them. So we repaired and retrofitted all 16 of these pumps. We replaced the rubber lip seals with what was commonly supplied with these pumps, a labyrinth seal. It is a very simple API labyrinth. It was made in two pieces, a rotor and a stator. The stator was positioned toward the oil lubricant in the pump and the rotor was installed toward the water spray contamination. That set-up seemed to work well at the Sears Tower.

What did you do next?
We decided to take that device and technology and apply it to process pumps. We first thought that it was a new breakthrough that kept the oil in the housing without contact or wear. We then learned that it was not much of a breakthrough because it had been done for thirty or more years in refineries and petrochemical plants. After all of that, we felt that we had something to bring to our customers as an upgrade to the rubber lip seal for ordinary process pumps.

The corn processing industry has a very distinct need to keep their equipment clean because the carbohydrates and mash would accumulate around the pump and would set overnight. The solution was to blast it with a fire hose on a daily basis. The fire hose-down was something that we thought we would be able to withstand with the new labyrinth seal.

Is that what they call a wash-down?
It was more violent than a wash-down. A wash-down is usually a small stream of water at high pressure. This was high pressure with a large stream of water. We tested our new device for water contamination and hit it with a garden hose. The bearing housing filled up with water, similar to the Titanic. It took about six months to design something that would work in severe hose-down conditions. We finally found a combination of rotor and stator that would keep oil in, but also ward off contamination up to and including a fire hose. Now we really had an upgrade. It would perform much better than any other labyrinth seals made by pump manufacturers because it would hold off any contamination without contact.

We first installed this device in 1975 at the Grain Processing Corporation plant in Muscatine, Iowa, which still remains to my knowledge, the largest potable ethyl alcohol producer in the world. It was installed in a very critical situation. It worked and it worked well. Now we knew we had something to market.

Are these bearing isolators still in operation today?
They very well could be. Grain Processing now has in the area of 3,000 pumps and some of the original bearing isolators are still operating to my knowledge. Now we had a device that was so good, non-wearing, non-contacting, that it was very much an upgrade to anything that was done before.

As a side note, in late 2005, Grain Processing returned some very corroded bearing isolators to us. I believe they were among the first, if not the very first, bearing isolators we ever manufactured back in 1975. The reason for the return was for upgrading to the VBXX-D, our latest design. They were still operating when removed. Moreover, had they not been removed, who knows how long they may have run - maybe forever!

Why did they upgrade? Was there anything wrong with the original design?
Absolutely nothing. It is was part of a reliability program they have where GPC ensures all of their bearing isolators are current.

Tell me more about the VBXX-D?
This is our latest design. Actually, when we first introduced it, it was available only as a premium upgrade where end users had to pay a higher price. What we did was take our standard bearing isolator, which was the VBX, and upgraded it. End user feedback, laboratory trials and field testing were at the heart of our upgraded design. Improvements and enhancements to the original included; the best possible interface for contamination exclusion, the next generation in design for oil retention with a tried and proven vapor blocking O-ring.

The VBXX-D offers end users levels of protection previously unavailable in any kind of bearing protection device. Understanding that our long-term obligation is to help end-users increase productivity with fast ROI, we made a commitment to offer the VBXX-D as our standard bearing isolator , which it is now.

How did the pump manufacturer get involved?
With my background being in pumps and pump design, we went to the pump manufacturing industry first. I personally visited every manufacturer of industrial process pumps that I knew of. My bearing isolators were considered too expensive to upgrade from a $2 lip seal to a $40 or $50 bearing isolator.

How about the Worthington Company that you had connections with?
The Worthington Company fell in line with the rest of the manufacturers thinking that they didn't need this. This is not something that our customers are calling for. Obviously their customers didn't know what a bearing isolator was. They weren't specifying it because they didn't know what it was or how it would improve their rotating equipment reliability.

Why did you name your company Inpro/Seal?
We named it Inpro/Seal to be simple. The name Inpro is a contraction of industrial and process. We had to be industrial and we had to be process in order to get the biggest bang out of rotating equipment reliability. Obviously we weren't heading toward protecting the bearings on automobiles, swimming pool pumps or anything like that. We were working toward the reliability of industrial process pumps. At that point we approached the process pump users and introduced the idea of upgrading their pumping equipment.

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