Automated Oil tank sandblast machine

[Farmers Machine]

I was approached about building an automated sandblasting machine to do the inside and outside of crude oil stroage tanks for corrosion control coating.

10' to 14' diameter 15 to 20 feet tall.

can a 2 HP 3 phase motor with encoder mounted " Automation Direct " be used as a servo motor just using a normal variable frequency drive? sandblasting is very harsh and brutal environment and the motors will constantly fail from dirt entering the inside, just wanted to mount them to worm gearboxes and let the device crawl along a roller chain and square tubing track, with sprocket mounted on the worm box somewhere between 30 and 50 inches per minute.realitivaly smoth movement is more important than .01" in 15 feet. you have a blast impact area approx. 12" circle and you have to overlap. or would upper and lower limit switches have to be used for these type of motors?Kinda wanted to have a program for each different size of tank so the crew could set up the machine and then click and go.

Thank You
The Farmer

[Geof]

Just a thought.....

You have a compressed air supply available. Why not use air motors? You could probably do every thing with air logic controls (if these are still available).