- Are your operators tired of climbing stairs, lifting, and manually dumping bags or drums?
- Do you want to reduce the loading time of your existing tumble blender?
- Are you tired of spilling ingredients or exposing your operators to fugitive dust?
Direct Charge Blender Loading™ is the most productive and safest way to load vacuum-tolerant tumble blenders, and can reduce blender loading time, with loading rates up to 6,000 pounds per hour.
Powdered ingredients enter the vacuum system through a “Pickup Point”, like a wand, bag dump station, or bulk bag unloader, reducing operator exposure to ingredients with less clean-up. Double handling is also eliminated, as ingredients can be conveyed directly from screeners.
The powdered ingredients are received in the blender.
Fine particles that carryover from the blender during the loading process are collected in a small filter separator.
The filter separator is floor-mounted and usually located in the blending suite. Keeping ingredients on the ground floor eliminates the need for forklifts in food and pharma rooms and helps improve user ergonomics and safety by eliminating stair-climbing. The new system design also reduces equipment footprint.
A positive-displacement pump creates the vacuum. It’s driven by a 3HP, 5HP or 7.5HP motor for convey rates from 1,000 to 6,000 pounds per hour and it can be located outside the blending room.
The system is turned “on”, and suction is generated at the pickup point. The powdered ingredient begins to flow up through the hose to fill the blender.
During loading, a small amount of carryover particles may collect in the floor-standing filter separator. For example, a 150 cubic foot blender with 3,300 lbs of ingredients may result in less than 2 lbs of carryover dust.
In most cases, direct-charge blender loading is continuous, until you run out of ingredients. This technique reduces loading times by 66% or more, and can reduce ingredient costs by changing to bulk bags instead of 25- or 50-lb bags.
Controls are simple: START and STOP. When the conveying process is completed, the suction stops and the filter on the filter separator is cleaned automatically by a jet of compressed air.
Existing blenders can be upgraded for direct-charge loading. Existing blender covers need to be modified by VAC-U-MAX. New GEMCO double-cone and slant-cone blenders come with a cover that has inlet, outlet and blocking valves.
For more information about Direct Charge Blender Loading contact VAC-U-MAX at www.vac-u-max.com and fill out RFQ.
For more information about GEMCO Blenders visit www.okgemco.com and fill out RFQ.
