Industrial Utility Efficiency
The basic function of vacuum degassing is to remove the vaporized gas and moisture from the extruded material. During the extrusion process, as raw materials melt under heat and pressure inside the extruder. The polymer chains and chemical compositions are going through changes, and a variety of gases are released.
Nowadays, pneumatic suction conveying is an important technology for feeding bulk goods gently through piping systems to the various process steps. In the area of food processing, the pharmaceutical and chemical industry and for material feed in plastics processing, suction conveying is indispensable when powder or granular materials have to be transported. The proper choice of the vacuum generator essentially determines the operating costs of a pneumatic conveying system.
More than 300 million tons of plastic is produced every year, and much of it ends up causing environmental problems. In response to these challenges, there are widespread global efforts to increase recycling capacity and innovate for more efficient and effective recycling solutions. Vacuum plays a critical role in achieving these improvements.
By using state-of-the-art vacuum technology for degassing mineral water, it has been possible to save an average of 3,000 cubic meters of water per filling plant per year. The solution was to replace the existing liquid ring vacuum pumps with MINK claw vacuum pumps from Busch Vacuum Solutions.
We present a few case studies derived on real-world application examples, where various vacuum technologies may be suitable solutions. Each case is generalized enough that the knowledge is applicable across multiple specific applications.
The food industries can have many messy processes, whether it is poultry evisceration, deboned waste conveying, bottling, or sugar cake filtration. Liquid ring vacuum pumps (LRVP’s) are often utilized as the backbone of these processes because they can handle the soft solids, debris, and particles that can easily get sucked into the vacuum pump. So how does a LRVP work, why does it work in these processes, and how to make sure they keep working?
Many of us are familiar with sizing vacuum pumps based on throughput, process pressure requirements, chamber size, pump down times, conductance and leakage. In a lot of cases, humidity becomes an afterthought and unexpected things happen. Some of these unexpected things we learn to live with, like emulsified oil. In other cases, the unexpected things prevent the pump from performing the job it was intended for.
Wintek Corporation was contacted by a plastics manufacturing company in the summer of 2015 to evaluate their process vacuum capabilities. The customer was looking to replace a recently purchased used vacuum system to be used in a PET solid state polymerization/drying application. The process required high heat and vacuum and needed to run at 1 mBarA (0.75 Torr). The customer had purchased the dryer and accompanying vacuum system from an overseas supplier. While they were happy with the dryer, the vacuum system was not delivering the desired performance.
Deciding on the most suitable vacuum technology for an industrial application can be challenging. This decision can be relatively easy if it is simply finding a drop-in replacement for an existing pump, but if a process keeps crashing an existing pump, it can get complicated when you are tasked with re-evaluating all the available options to find the best solution. I am hoping to highlight a few key factors to consider when you run into this type of scenario.
In this article, we discuss both vacuum pump inlet and exhaust filtration and explore how protecting your vacuum pump can increase productivity and help businesses reach their sustainability objectives.
