Vortex partners with Advantage Reline to offer SIPP

Vortex Companies (Houston, TX, US) on April 3 announced a strategic partnership with Advantage Reline (Temecula, CA, US), developer of a sprayed-in-place pipe (SIPP) trenchless technology for the municipal, industrial and commercial market sectors.

The Vortex family of brands, which includes Schwalm USA (Greenville, SC, US), Quadex (Houston, TX, US), Picote (Porvoo, Finland) and Deep Trekker (Kitchener, ON, Canada), combined with Advantage Reline's technology, will help broaden awareness and application opportunities for SIPP.

"The industry has placed great emphasis on [cured-in-place-pipe] CIPP alternatives and by partnering with Advantage Reline, we can now utilize our Schwalm Robot to deliver our Quadex polymeric materials in pipe, and continue to fill this gap in the market," says Andrew Gonnella, Vortex's EVP of sales and marketing.

"The Vortex Companies offer the most complete platform for delivering trenchless solutions to the market," says David Asay, president of Advantage Reline. "Vortex already has an established line of proven pipe and manhole rehabilitation solutions that complement our SIPP technology. The Schwalm robot is the perfect delivery vehicle for our SIPP technology." 

A critical component of Advantage Reline's SIPP technology is a custom spray nozzle that is attached to the Schwalm robot and can apply a variety of polymeric materials including epoxy and polyurea.

"Since our robots are on every job for cleaning, cutting and lateral reinstatement, it made sense to design an adaptor to push the spray nozzle through the pipe," says Ken Cochrane, VP general manager for Schwalm USA. The SIPP nozzle is also compatible with the broad range of Quadex polymeric materials.

"Depending on the project specs, we can easily custom formulate a polymeric coating to work with this SIPP System," adds Brock Stone, VP, product manager of Polymeric Materials for Vortex. "This type of flexibility in a system, featuring such a broad range of proven technologies, has never been seen before."

The approach comes in the form of the Quadex sprayMASTER II, a fully equipped coating and lining trailer, that includes the primary delivery unit, a Schwalm robot, a Picote brush coating system, a Deep Trekker pipe inspection crawler, Advantage Reline SIPP technology and Quadex polymeric materials.