How Neoceram’s solution drastically reduced maintenance costs and the equipment needed to produce a variety of fruit preparations.
COMPANY PROFILE : Our customer is one of the best-known marmalade producing companies in Belgium. The company offers a wide range of juice, fruit preparations, compotes, jams such as strawberry, peach, apricot, plum, pineapple, raspberry, cherry and orange marmalade. The company extends its services throughout Belgium.
Looking to reduce machine maintenance times.
CONTEXT : The company was looking to improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). As the OEE is calculated by multiplying three main factors: Availability, Performance and Quality. In this case, the focus was to improve machine availability and reduce downtimes.
Marmalades, jams and various fruit preparations can be extremely abrasive.
CHALLENGE : This was the experience of the best-known marmalade producing company in Belgium that used stainless steel rotary valves. Little fruit seeds lodged themselves in the gap between the plug and the cylinder and ground deep grooves in the valves, which promptly started to leak.
Lubrication was required at machine start up and the valves were completely worn out in 6 months requiring costly maintenance or replacement.
Ceramic rotary valves instead of stainless components.
SOLUTION : As the company needed to replace Waukesha equipment in 2004, Neoceram developed specific ceramic rotary valves (see picture) for their existing Elmar rotary filling machine.
RESULT : These ceramic rotary valves do not wear, they do not leak and they run for years without the need for replacement. The result is a reduction in labour costs, equipment costs and through very precise dosing, the loss of filled product due to leakage/overfill etc.
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