Packagers discover the efficiency, substantial savings and increased production available through pneumatic conveying
With all the buzz that’s been occurring for over a decade about lean manufacturing and automation, it is surprising that more companies haven’t integrated such practices into their production lines. In fact, 94 percent of packagers believe that flexibility and automation provide competitive advantages, yet many of them still use manual processes and outdated equipment that eat away at precious revenue.
But with today’s economic pressures, a growing number of plant managers and others charged with conveying powders, granulars and flakes for packaging are adopting the automatic operation of vacuum conveyors, blenders and packaging equipment as standards to hit critical price points for market success.
When contemplating the move to automated processes, those charged with streamlining production cite cost, flexibility, reliability and product quality among their top concerns. First and foremost among those concerns is how the process will affect product quality, as the moving of powder can typically changes its size, density, and texture, affecting product quality.
Preserving Product Quality
Pacon Manufacturing, an innovative contract manufacturer and product converter for the consumer, medical, and industrial markets, had to consider this when a particular project required high speed conveying and dispensing of a blended powder into two layers of non-woven material. The material was being ultrasonically sealed after the powder was dispensed.
The product being dispensed was a facial care product. In this application, the powder’s self-lathering properties were critically affected by how the powder was conveyed to the auger fillers. If the powder particles became too small, the product would self-lather too fast upon use. If the particles became too large, the self-lathering process took too long. Changing the density, component blend, and texture would produce inconsistent fill rates or volumes - both unacceptable for quality control.
"Because product manufacturing speed ultimately sets the price, our goal wasn’t only to develop the product but also to develop a process that maintained quality at the necessary price point," said Pacon Manufacturing Vice President Mike Scaduto. "To do this, we had to minimize labor while meeting stringent consistency requirements for moving and dispensing our powder at high volume."
When Pacon investigated traditional ingredient transfer methods such as super sacks and screw conveyors, they found these had insurmountable drawbacks for this application including production interruptions and degraded particle size.
A positive air-based conveying system looked promising but disrupted particle size too much when transported through piping. Like the other methods considered, it also would have occupied more production floor space than desired, and would have been difficult to sanitize during cleaning and maintenance with a 70% alcohol-water solution.
The system that has satisfied all of Pacon’s needs was provided by Vac-U-Max, a supplier of pneumatic conveying equipment based in Belleville, NJ. The system consists of two low-profile drum dump stations for easy loading, powered by negative vacuum through convey line piping to three auger fillers. One drum dump station supplies powder to a single auger filler, the other supplies the remaining two auger fillers. The auger fillers are provided by another company and integrated into the system.
Since powder can change density in the auger filler head, leading to improper fills, keeping the head full and at proper density was critical. To maintain proper powder density in the auger filler heads and effect accurate fills, Pacon’s conveying expert mounted powder receivers with customized multi-filters above the auger fillers. The expert also applied a high polish finish to the conveyor system interior and exterior, reducing powder sticking inside the system and rendering the exterior easier to clean.
Vac-U-Max modified the powder receivers to help transport the powder without degradation, and customized standard components to fit the processes and product, reducing the potential of powder degradation and ultimately maintaining powder quality.
In addition, a device checks powder level at each of the three auger filler hoppers. When more powder is needed, pre-determined volumes of powder are automatically delivered to fill the hoppers.
The system is designed simply for ease of maintenance. The modular convey pipes have a specially designed receiver for quick tool-less assembly/disassembly and easy cleaning. The drum dump stations are fabricated with no crevices and the fewest possible welds. Interior bends and corner welds have a minimum 1/8" radius to minimize material accumulation. A line discharger purges the conveyor system at the end of each convey cycle to prevent fallback powder and make restarts easier.
On installation, the conveying expert worked with Pacon Manufacturing to adapt the system to their needs. Instead of hanging the convey piping from the ceiling or supporting it from the floor, they mounted it on machinery to better accommodate a vertical receiver adjustment mechanism designed by Scaduto. The result was a modular system easy to install or relocate, and which took significantly less production floor space than typical material convey systems.
Flexibility
Like Pacon Manufacturing, Caf Soluble, a producer and packager of roasted ground coffee, had also considered mechanical conveying systems. However, they had rejected those methods, which had included a hybrid system consisting of screw conveyors matched with a batch scale, because they took up too much space or they lacked the flexibility Caf Soluble desired.
After experiencing exponential growth, however, Caf Soluble’s Plant Manager, Ernest Hurtado, assisted in overhauling the operation that had been handling all the batching, blending and intermediate steps by hand. “I had an army of people moving boxes [of coffee] around. We grew so quickly that we couldn’t handle all the material handling.”
When evaluating options for improving the material handling, batching, and blending steps, Caf Soluble sought a system that could grow with the company and still fit within budgetary constraints. “We knew that at some point we would change the design, move things around a little bit. With a screw conveyor or a bucket elevator, that would require a lot of space,” said Hurtado, and the Vac-U-Max system fit within their requirements.
Like Pacon manufacturing, Caf Soluble ended up going with pneumatic conveyors. Compared with screw conveyors and bucket elevators, the conveyors are “very easy to move from here to there,” Hurtado said. “You just plug in your air connection, and you’re ready to go. You just need suitable overhead support, and it can be as elegant or as crude as you like. You can even just hang it up with wires from the roof. It’s a very flexible system.”
Caf Soluble overhauled its material handling and batching systems with the installation of six vacuum receivers. Two of them are outfitted with load cells and a weight control system and function as weigh hoppers over two blenders. The other four vacuum receivers are installed in pairs, with a pair on each of two hoppers that feed the packaging machines. The installation has virtually eliminated manual material handling.
The operation begins at the grinder, which discharges ground coffee into small hoppers, each dedicated to a particular coffee variety. As the coffee fills these hoppers, the vacuum receivers over the blenders generate negative pressure and pull the coffee from the various hoppers through conveying lines.
When the coffee reaches the end of a 10-meter conveying line, a vacuum receiver is filled until the target weight is achieved. Typically, a Vac-U-Max vacuum receiver will pull 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of coffee from a hopper before discharging it to the blender below. By repeating the operation 16 times, the batch grows to 320 pounds. A worker then makes minor additions by hand to finish the recipe, and the blender mixes that batch of coffee. As that blender operates, the other receiver is loading the second blender. This transforms a batch operation into a continuous one. One batching cycle —loading, blending, and discharge— takes about 15 minutes.
After blending, the coffee discharges into a screw conveyor that feeds a bucket elevator. The bucket elevator carries the blended coffee to a floor-mounted silo that holds the coffee until it’s required at the packaging machines. When that time comes, the four vacuum receivers mounted on the packaging feed hoppers work in tandem to withdraw the coffee. It travels 10 meters vertically before discharging into the feed hoppers.
Vac-u-Max Level switches control the operation of the four vacuum receivers by signaling for more coffee when the level drops below a certain point. The switches also stop the vacuum receivers when the level in the hopper reaches the high set point. The coffee then flows to the vertical form-fill-seal packaging machines, each with four lanes. The machines package about 1,750 pounds (800 kilograms) of coffee an hour.
Although initially the cost of the pneumatic conveying system was higher, the costs savings of installation and operation favored pneumatic conveying. “We do the conveying and weighing in one operation, whereas if we used separate components, I would have had to buy the screw conveyors or bucket elevators from one source and the weighing equipment and the controllers from another source. Getting it all in one package was a great advantage cost-wise. On the batching system, we realized a big savings compared with a separate system,” noted Hurtado.
Before overhauling the operation, Caf Soluble needed 40 workers over three shifts. Now Caf Soluble needs only 12 workers over three shifts.
Reliability
Reducing man hours and increasing production speed are not the only ways that automating a packaging process with pneumatic conveyors produces cost benefits. Pneumatic conveyors also increase system reliability, adding hours of production to the schedule.
Doumak Inc., one of the world's largest marshmallow producers, increased production by nearly 500 hours a year by employing a Vac-U-Max pneumatic conveying system to their packaging operation.
Mike Morgan is a veteran of food industry production who has worked at a number of plants over the years including serving as maintenance supervisor at Doumak's Bensenville, Illinois plant. He said, “There is virtually no maintenance or cleaning necessary in the pneumatic conveying systems because they have few moving parts. We just clean or swap out hoses, and check the motor and oil twice a year. That adds perhaps 30 hours a year of production, compared to doing monthly preventive maintenance on 20 or so moving parts for bucket-elevator type systems."
In the marshmallow making process, numerous pinch points of bucket elevators or conveyor belts can also compromise product quality. When an excessive amount of starch remains in equipment, product quality can diminish and production costs rise as materials go to waste. In addition to increasing production costs and adding to cleanup time, these and other open-air conveyors can contribute to respiratory hazards, necessitating that operators wear dust masks or respirators. They can even create an explosive hazard if dust or powders, such as starch, mix with air in certain combinations.
Instead of bucket elevators dumping marshmallows into packaging machines at an inflexible pace, vacuum receivers pneumatically convey the marshmallows through six FDA, USDA-approved hoses to the packaging machines on demand.
"There's a need for flexibility and integration that's often unmet by bucket elevators or similar conventional equipment,” said Morgan,. "In my experience, when a packaging machine malfunctions with a bucket elevator, production shuts down for at least 30 minutes. With 24/7 plant operation, we need constant throughput. On a production schedule that tight, any downtime immediately impacts revenue."
Essential to plant efficiency is the ability for conveying equipment used in production to properly coordinate with packaging equipment. Ultimately when a packaging machine goes off-line, product should be re-routable to operating machines. As well, the conveying equipment should adjust speed when packaging machines fill bags of different sizes. Traditional conveying equipment, however, such as bucket elevators, fail on these accounts.
"With pneumatic conveying, if a packaging machine malfunctions, we can easily divert product to the other machines at the touch of a button," says Morgan. "And we have individual feed control, which allows the packaging machines to run at maximum efficiency, no matter what size the product or bag. There's no overfeeding one machine and underfeeding another. The flexibility of pneumatic conveying adds about 8 hours a week to production, eliminating many of the production/packaging bottlenecks of bucket elevator systems."
An additional benefit of the Vac-u-Max pneumatic conveying systems is they require 70 percent less factory floor space than their bucket elevator equivalents. The extra floor space allows Doumak to store raw materials next to the production line, saving travel time to restock at a central supply location.
As companies move through an uncertain economy into the 21st century, only those with the most efficient, flexible and cost-effective operations will survive. Pneumatic conveying systems bring these elements into line affordably and effectively.
VAC-U-MAX offers a wide range of standard pneumatic conveyor systems, weighing systems and accessories, plus semi-custom systems, as well as totally custom-engineered systems. They offer factory testing of trial materials, as well as installation assistance and full maintenance documentation. They are the provider of choice of many well-known companies in the food, drug, and industrial manufacturing sectors.
For more information about VAC-U-MAX pneumatic material handling or industrial vacuum cleaning solutions, please visit:
Automating Packaging Lines
Only The Lean and Mean Survive
Packagers discover the efficiency, substantial savings and increased production available through pneumatic conveying
With all the buzz that’s been occurring for over a decade about lean manufacturing and automation, it is surprising that more companies haven’t integrated such practices into their production lines. In fact, 94 percent of packagers believe that flexibility and automation provide competitive advantages, yet many of them still use manual processes and outdated equipment that eat away at precious revenue.
But with today’s economic pressures, a growing number of plant managers and others charged with conveying powders, granulars and flakes for packaging are adopting the automatic operation of vacuum conveyors, blenders and packaging equipment as standards to hit critical price points for market success.
When contemplating the move to automated processes, those charged with streamlining production cite cost, flexibility, reliability and product quality among their top concerns. First and foremost among those concerns is how the process will affect product quality, as the moving of powder can typically changes its size, density, and texture, affecting product quality.
Preserving Product Quality
Pacon Manufacturing, an innovative contract manufacturer and product converter for the consumer, medical, and industrial markets, had to consider this when a particular project required high speed conveying and dispensing of a blended powder into two layers of non-woven material. The material was being ultrasonically sealed after the powder was dispensed.
The product being dispensed was a facial care product. In this application, the powder’s self-lathering properties were critically affected by how the powder was conveyed to the auger fillers. If the powder particles became too small, the product would self-lather too fast upon use. If the particles became too large, the self-lathering process took too long. Changing the density, component blend, and texture would produce inconsistent fill rates or volumes - both unacceptable for quality control.
"Because product manufacturing speed ultimately sets the price, our goal wasn’t only to develop the product but also to develop a process that maintained quality at the necessary price point," said Pacon Manufacturing Vice President Mike Scaduto. "To do this, we had to minimize labor while meeting stringent consistency requirements for moving and dispensing our powder at high volume."
When Pacon investigated traditional ingredient transfer methods such as super sacks and screw conveyors, they found these had insurmountable drawbacks for this application including production interruptions and degraded particle size.
A positive air-based conveying system looked promising but disrupted particle size too much when transported through piping. Like the other methods considered, it also would have occupied more production floor space than desired, and would have been difficult to sanitize during cleaning and maintenance with a 70% alcohol-water solution.
The system that has satisfied all of Pacon’s needs was provided by Vac-U-Max, a supplier of pneumatic conveying equipment based in Belleville, NJ. The system consists of two low-profile drum dump stations for easy loading, powered by negative vacuum through convey line piping to three auger fillers. One drum dump station supplies powder to a single auger filler, the other supplies the remaining two auger fillers. The auger fillers are provided by another company and integrated into the system.
Since powder can change density in the auger filler head, leading to improper fills, keeping the head full and at proper density was critical. To maintain proper powder density in the auger filler heads and effect accurate fills, Pacon’s conveying expert mounted powder receivers with customized multi-filters above the auger fillers. The expert also applied a high polish finish to the conveyor system interior and exterior, reducing powder sticking inside the system and rendering the exterior easier to clean.
Vac-U-Max modified the powder receivers to help transport the powder without degradation, and customized standard components to fit the processes and product, reducing the potential of powder degradation and ultimately maintaining powder quality.
In addition, a device checks powder level at each of the three auger filler hoppers. When more powder is needed, pre-determined volumes of powder are automatically delivered to fill the hoppers.
The system is designed simply for ease of maintenance. The modular convey pipes have a specially designed receiver for quick tool-less assembly/disassembly and easy cleaning. The drum dump stations are fabricated with no crevices and the fewest possible welds. Interior bends and corner welds have a minimum 1/8" radius to minimize material accumulation. A line discharger purges the conveyor system at the end of each convey cycle to prevent fallback powder and make restarts easier.
On installation, the conveying expert worked with Pacon Manufacturing to adapt the system to their needs. Instead of hanging the convey piping from the ceiling or supporting it from the floor, they mounted it on machinery to better accommodate a vertical receiver adjustment mechanism designed by Scaduto. The result was a modular system easy to install or relocate, and which took significantly less production floor space than typical material convey systems.
Flexibility
Like Pacon Manufacturing, Caf Soluble, a producer and packager of roasted ground coffee, had also considered mechanical conveying systems. However, they had rejected those methods, which had included a hybrid system consisting of screw conveyors matched with a batch scale, because they took up too much space or they lacked the flexibility Caf Soluble desired.
After experiencing exponential growth, however, Caf Soluble’s Plant Manager, Ernest Hurtado, assisted in overhauling the operation that had been handling all the batching, blending and intermediate steps by hand. “I had an army of people moving boxes [of coffee] around. We grew so quickly that we couldn’t handle all the material handling.”
When evaluating options for improving the material handling, batching, and blending steps, Caf Soluble sought a system that could grow with the company and still fit within budgetary constraints. “We knew that at some point we would change the design, move things around a little bit. With a screw conveyor or a bucket elevator, that would require a lot of space,” said Hurtado, and the Vac-U-Max system fit within their requirements.
Like Pacon manufacturing, Caf Soluble ended up going with pneumatic conveyors. Compared with screw conveyors and bucket elevators, the conveyors are “very easy to move from here to there,” Hurtado said. “You just plug in your air connection, and you’re ready to go. You just need suitable overhead support, and it can be as elegant or as crude as you like. You can even just hang it up with wires from the roof. It’s a very flexible system.”
Caf Soluble overhauled its material handling and batching systems with the installation of six vacuum receivers. Two of them are outfitted with load cells and a weight control system and function as weigh hoppers over two blenders. The other four vacuum receivers are installed in pairs, with a pair on each of two hoppers that feed the packaging machines. The installation has virtually eliminated manual material handling.
The operation begins at the grinder, which discharges ground coffee into small hoppers, each dedicated to a particular coffee variety. As the coffee fills these hoppers, the vacuum receivers over the blenders generate negative pressure and pull the coffee from the various hoppers through conveying lines.
When the coffee reaches the end of a 10-meter conveying line, a vacuum receiver is filled until the target weight is achieved. Typically, a Vac-U-Max vacuum receiver will pull 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of coffee from a hopper before discharging it to the blender below. By repeating the operation 16 times, the batch grows to 320 pounds. A worker then makes minor additions by hand to finish the recipe, and the blender mixes that batch of coffee. As that blender operates, the other receiver is loading the second blender. This transforms a batch operation into a continuous one. One batching cycle —loading, blending, and discharge— takes about 15 minutes.
After blending, the coffee discharges into a screw conveyor that feeds a bucket elevator. The bucket elevator carries the blended coffee to a floor-mounted silo that holds the coffee until it’s required at the packaging machines. When that time comes, the four vacuum receivers mounted on the packaging feed hoppers work in tandem to withdraw the coffee. It travels 10 meters vertically before discharging into the feed hoppers.
Vac-u-Max Level switches control the operation of the four vacuum receivers by signaling for more coffee when the level drops below a certain point. The switches also stop the vacuum receivers when the level in the hopper reaches the high set point. The coffee then flows to the vertical form-fill-seal packaging machines, each with four lanes. The machines package about 1,750 pounds (800 kilograms) of coffee an hour.
Although initially the cost of the pneumatic conveying system was higher, the costs savings of installation and operation favored pneumatic conveying. “We do the conveying and weighing in one operation, whereas if we used separate components, I would have had to buy the screw conveyors or bucket elevators from one source and the weighing equipment and the controllers from another source. Getting it all in one package was a great advantage cost-wise. On the batching system, we realized a big savings compared with a separate system,” noted Hurtado.
Before overhauling the operation, Caf Soluble needed 40 workers over three shifts. Now Caf Soluble needs only 12 workers over three shifts.
Reliability
Reducing man hours and increasing production speed are not the only ways that automating a packaging process with pneumatic conveyors produces cost benefits. Pneumatic conveyors also increase system reliability, adding hours of production to the schedule.
Doumak Inc., one of the world's largest marshmallow producers, increased production by nearly 500 hours a year by employing a Vac-U-Max pneumatic conveying system to their packaging operation.
Mike Morgan is a veteran of food industry production who has worked at a number of plants over the years including serving as maintenance supervisor at Doumak's Bensenville, Illinois plant. He said, “There is virtually no maintenance or cleaning necessary in the pneumatic conveying systems because they have few moving parts. We just clean or swap out hoses, and check the motor and oil twice a year. That adds perhaps 30 hours a year of production, compared to doing monthly preventive maintenance on 20 or so moving parts for bucket-elevator type systems."
In the marshmallow making process, numerous pinch points of bucket elevators or conveyor belts can also compromise product quality. When an excessive amount of starch remains in equipment, product quality can diminish and production costs rise as materials go to waste. In addition to increasing production costs and adding to cleanup time, these and other open-air conveyors can contribute to respiratory hazards, necessitating that operators wear dust masks or respirators. They can even create an explosive hazard if dust or powders, such as starch, mix with air in certain combinations.
Instead of bucket elevators dumping marshmallows into packaging machines at an inflexible pace, vacuum receivers pneumatically convey the marshmallows through six FDA, USDA-approved hoses to the packaging machines on demand.
"There's a need for flexibility and integration that's often unmet by bucket elevators or similar conventional equipment,” said Morgan,. "In my experience, when a packaging machine malfunctions with a bucket elevator, production shuts down for at least 30 minutes. With 24/7 plant operation, we need constant throughput. On a production schedule that tight, any downtime immediately impacts revenue."
Essential to plant efficiency is the ability for conveying equipment used in production to properly coordinate with packaging equipment. Ultimately when a packaging machine goes off-line, product should be re-routable to operating machines. As well, the conveying equipment should adjust speed when packaging machines fill bags of different sizes. Traditional conveying equipment, however, such as bucket elevators, fail on these accounts.
"With pneumatic conveying, if a packaging machine malfunctions, we can easily divert product to the other machines at the touch of a button," says Morgan. "And we have individual feed control, which allows the packaging machines to run at maximum efficiency, no matter what size the product or bag. There's no overfeeding one machine and underfeeding another. The flexibility of pneumatic conveying adds about 8 hours a week to production, eliminating many of the production/packaging bottlenecks of bucket elevator systems."
An additional benefit of the Vac-u-Max pneumatic conveying systems is they require 70 percent less factory floor space than their bucket elevator equivalents. The extra floor space allows Doumak to store raw materials next to the production line, saving travel time to restock at a central supply location.
As companies move through an uncertain economy into the 21st century, only those with the most efficient, flexible and cost-effective operations will survive. Pneumatic conveying systems bring these elements into line affordably and effectively.
VAC-U-MAX offers a wide range of standard pneumatic conveyor systems, weighing systems and accessories, plus semi-custom systems, as well as totally custom-engineered systems. They offer factory testing of trial materials, as well as installation assistance and full maintenance documentation. They are the provider of choice of many well-known companies in the food, drug, and industrial manufacturing sectors.
For more information about VAC-U-MAX pneumatic material handling or industrial vacuum cleaning solutions, please visit:
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