Butcher’s Pet Care Ltd chose a Spiroflow ‘round-the-corner’ Aero Mechanical Conveyor for their new $61 million, state-of-the-art factory in Crick, Northamptonshire UK. In their previous facility, minor ingredients were loaded into two mixers and then combined with the main bulk meat products on the ground floor. Their impressive new factory is a high roof, single story building. The mixers are mounted on a raised platform and they needed a way to load rice and dried peas from the ground floor level. Cue Spiroflow! Senior Controls Engineer Andrew Pynn invited Spiroflow and other suppliers to recommend a suitable conveying solution. Spiroflow considered Pynn’s requirements and recommended an Aero Mechanical Conveyor. This type of conveyor moves material through an enclosed tube via a partial vacuum created by a series of discs travelling at high speed.
Engineers from Butcher’s Pet Care witnessed trials conducted at Spiroflow’s test center using samples of their rice and dried peas. They organized similar trials with a vacuum conveyor specialist and found that the Spiroflow Aero Mechanical Conveyor offered better performance in terms of both conveying rate and minimal product damage.
The Spiroflow Aero Mechanical Conveyor is stainless steel and complete with an integral sack tip hopper. From the hopper, materials are lifted 15 feet then horizontally conveyed 11.5 feet before emptying into an existing hopper. This second hopper has a reversible auger at its outlet so that ingredients can be delivered to either one of two mixers. Depending upon the particular recipe, three to four mixes are produced every hour, 24 hours per day, five days per week. Andrew Pynn comments, “Our own engineers installed and commissioned the Spiroflow Aero Mechanical Conveyor about a year ago now and it has performed well ever since.”
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