Leveraging gas as a power source is an exciting prospect for Africa. It offers not only reasonable costs but will have a lower environmental impact. While natural gas is generally a clean burning fuel, gas generated from landfill sites is a harsher application for engines.

Andrew Yorke, says, it is difficult to control the level of contaminants in gas that emanate from landfill sites. 

Yorke says that the relatively poor quality of gas requires advanced ignition monitoring systems in the engine. In addition, the wear rates remain high due to the highly abrasive post-combustion residue, despite filtering of the gas.

This means that the gas engines that operate in these applications require frequent maintenance. The service intervals will also be reduce. As a comparison, you will need to replace natural gas cylinder heads every 20,000 to 30,000 hours.

South Africa has world class facilities

There is no real cause for concern. South Africa has a world class engine component remanufacturing capability in Metric Automotive Engineering. Access to the requisite skills and cutting edge equipment needed to optimise the lifespan of gas engines is an advantage to these industries.

The company has been in operation for more than 50 years. With its decades of experience underpinning the remanufacturing of both diesel and gas engine components. They meet the exacting original equipment manufacturer (OEM) standards.

Yorke says that Metric Automotive Engineering conducts work for customers in the both the natural gas and landfill gas segments. They cover generating capacity of the engines is usually between 1 MW and 10 MW. 

The company also provides customers with service exchange units. This enhances efficiencies in the maintenance process and reduces downtime. It also allows customers to have remanufactured components such as cylinder head assemblies readily available when worn components need replacement.

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