Reduced Maintenance
Downtime is one of the worst enemies of a manufacturing facility and immediately impacts revenue.  In addition to reduced or eliminated downtime for maintenance, downtime for cleaning is also considerably decreased with pneumatic conveying systems.

A particular facility found that there was virtually no maintenance or cleaning necessary in pneumatic conveying systems because they have few moving parts. They were able to simply clean or swap out hoses and check the motor and oil twice a year. Approximately 30 hours of production per year was added.

Adaptability
Of course a system should be tailored to the specific material being utilized within the process—and if needed, the system should be able to accommodate different materials if more than one process will be being performed on a line at different times or have the ability to adjust based on the volume of production necessary for specific runs.

For example, one company utilized a pneumatic conveying dump station to feed ingredients to blenders for smaller and normal size orders. But for higher volume products such as snack-food coatings and flour, they pneumatically loaded blenders directly from silos at an even greater rate of speed.

There are even cases when a system must be mobile so that it can be moved to a different location within a plant. If this is a needed requirement, it can and should be accommodated.

Pneumatic conveying systems can be utilized for virtually any material and application, including conveying water treatment chemicals.

Keep Your Eye on the Prize
The entire goal of pneumatic conveying systems is to automate operations and make them more cost-effective; in effect, to simplify processes. Less complexity equals less downtime, reduced man-hours and reduced overall cost. There should not be added complexity in evaluating and choosing such a system. With expert guidance such as that from Vac-U-Max, a company should be able to follow the evaluation elements as roughly laid out above and stick to them—and thereby attain them.

To read more about VAC-U-MAX solutions in your industry, visit www.vac-u-max.com and click on case histories on the pneumatic conveying page or contact us at 1-800-VAC-U-MAX (800-822-8629); email  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Bruce Boyers is a freelance writer based in Glendale, Calif.