Our pneumatic vacuum conveying technology has developed quite a loyal following within powder and bulk processing circles over many decades and now it’s getting attention outside the process industries. More and more engineers want to know how to move products and materials of all kinds as fast, safely, and efficiently as possible and they see our approach as a novel way to automate a wide range of material handling tasks and solve staffing, maintenance, and other pressing issues. Eric Lanke, the host of the prestigious Fluid Power Forum podcast, for example, recently read an article about our conveyors and invited us to explain how pneumatic vacuum technology works, where it’s currently being used, and why engineers are taking a closer look at its potential applications.

Our own Bill Fucich, senior sales engineer, explained to Eric and his listeners that the rapidly growing awareness about our conveyors is due to its key advantages versus other ways to move material from one point to another. Bill cites the conveyor’s enclosed nature that protects ingredients like sugar and salt from contamination from exposure to the plant environment (and protects workers from exposure to dust); the explosion-proof design that allows safe installation in Class I and Class II hazardous environments; the ability to quickly disassemble the entire receiver with no tools for cleaning; and to work without any electricity or rotating parts.

Bill describes how the vacuum conveyor works in detail and how our vacuum pump uses the venturi principle to create enough suction via compressed air to transfer difficult materials with high bulk densities like copper and stainless steel as well as materials with very low bulk densities like fumed silica. Discussing key applications, Bill highlighted the role of our PowTReX conveying system in the growing additive manufacturing – 3D printing industry. The PowTReX conveyor transfers metal powders to 3D printers, then captures, screens, and returns the powdered metal to storage or to a hopper for reuse.

Bill also explained the differences between our Volkmann PPC Series conveyors for pharmaceutical and other hygienic applications and the Volkmann VS Series conveyors, which he calls “the workhorse” for transferring chemicals and almost anything else that doesn’t require cGMP compliance.

But it’s the engineering challenges that Bill calls the sweet spot of our operation – and we all agree that we’re at our most innovative when challenged with an application that nobody else wants to touch.

Listen to the podcast episode here.

 

Secret to Safe, Smooth Conveying is Volkmann

A maintenance technician for a major food manufacturer who took on a new job as a chief engineer with a different major food manufacturer asked us about converting the entire material transfer process from a series of open belt conveyors and bucket elevators to our pneumatic vacuum conveying systems. “After so many years using your conveyors, coming over to this plant seemed like it was in the stone age,” said the chief engineer, who signed a non-disclosure and cannot be named. “For a sanitary plant, it was a recall waiting to happen. Replacing everything with Volkmann conveyors was the first order of business.”

We know it’s unsatisfying to read when we can’t put an actual name to the story but nearly all of our customers are either bound by non-disclosures and are not allowed to provide their names or their companies consider our conveying systems a competitive advantage to be kept quiet and under wraps. Magazine editors are always asking us about writing stories showing how a customer uses our conveyors. Our sales people are always trying to get videos of our conveyors installed in live action. The answer is almost always, “No, our Volkmann is our secret,” or something similar.

Last year, when a global pharmaceutical company acquired a growing nutritional supplements company, a process engineer for the big pharma company touring his newly acquired facility was impressed by our pneumatic vacuum conveyors. Our systems were being used to transfer powdered ingredients from bulk bags and sacks to mixers, and again downstream to capture finished tablets at the tablet press, transferring them automatically to the filling line. “I was struck by the cleanliness of the process,” said the process engineer, who couldn’t divulge a name. “That’s why I started adding Volkmann conveyors to every one of my pharmaceutical production lines. The results have been as phenomenal as anticipated.”

Then there’s the chemical engineer who started working with a major chemical manufacturer as an intern while in college. The company was transferring ignitable powders in our pneumatic vacuum conveyor systems from drums and barrels directly into a vessel. “That’s how I learned about the ATEX certification, combustible dust explosions, and how to avoid them,” says the chemical engineer. Nearly 20 years later, the same conveying system continues to operate day and night and the intern is now the plant manager who has specified additional Volkmann vacuum conveyors for a number of material transfer applications. “Volkmann conveyors are explosion-proof by design so I don’t have to worry about keeping my staff safe,” he added. “But it’s all our secret, ok?”

Learn more about conveying your materials here.

 

Why Waste Material When We Can Capture and Reuse It?

Material shortages, staffing and supply chain issues, and constantly increasing prices for what material is available make every ounce more valuable, and every ounce wasted more costly. Allowing material to be discarded when we have the ability to capture, recover, and reuse it never made much sense but now that we can provide a net savings by recycling in nearly every case, there isn’t even financial justification for landfilling material as waste.

Conveying Systems Automate Recycling

We’ve been designing and manufacturing pneumatic vacuum conveying systems that automatically capture and recycle excess, off-spec, and waste material for many decades, for hundreds of different materials, all over the world. Of the many different installations, the food, pharmaceutical, and 3D printing examples that follow show how recycling saves on material and disposal costs, streamlines the overall process, and even improves sanitation and worker safety:

Snack Food Conveying and Recycling

A snack food manufacturer was dispensing salt as a curtain onto pretzels as they moved down a belt conveyor towards the oven. Most of the salt, of course, lands on the conveyor, not on the pretzels. Our system captures this excess salt in a hopper and automatically transfers it inside enclosed piping back to the dispenser for reuse. This controls dust and prevents contamination, and there’s no worker involvement required.

Recycling Pharmaceutical Active Ingredients

For a pharmaceutical company manufacturing tablets with a roller compactor, our conveying system automatically feeds the mixed powders into the compactor, then collects any fines, small granules, and excess material, and transfers it for sieving, granulation, and return back to the compaction process. The APIs are too precious to let them go as waste. The process engineer was happy to recover the excipients, too.

Conveying and Recycling Metal Powders

In additive manufacturing, the 3D printing process typically leaves a significant amount of metal material in the printer. Not only are these materials expensive and challenging to source, making reuse essential, but many are also hazardous and need to be contained. Manual collection of this excess material must be avoided. Our PowTReX metal powder recovery system automatically captures the excess or spent material, returns it to the proper particle size with ultrasonic screening, and transfers it to a hopper or bin for reuse. It’s an enclosed, contactless process that protects material purity and keeps workers safe at the same time.

Recovering and reusing what used to be considered waste material has become so vital that many of the leading manufacturers of 3D printers, filling and packaging machines, and other equipment specify our conveying systems as part of their original equipment to offer recycling as a standard feature.

Learn more about conveying your materials here.

Vast Experience Testing Hundreds of Materials Ensures Every Conveyor Works as Specified

We received an inquiry from the owner of a nutrition company who asked how fast we could deliver a pneumatic vacuum conveying system. He had recently automated a few steps in the packaging line with excellent results in line speed and labor savings and wanted to add automation to the processing and filling lines as quickly as possible. He’d had enough of loading heavy bags of vitamin C powder and filler into the mixer and cleaning up the dust and spillage so automating this step with a conveying system seemed an obvious place to start.

After waiting more than six months from purchase order to installation for the automated tablet counter, it came as a surprise that we’d be able to spec and quote a pneumatic vacuum conveying system within a few days of our first conversation and deliver the finished system ready for installation about seven to 10 weeks later. How??

“We’ve done this before,” I explained, “hundreds upon hundreds of times.”

Volkmann was founded almost 50 years ago. We have conveyors running in food, chemical, pharmaceutical, and other plants all over the world transferring every type of material from fine powders and irregular flakes to pellets, tablets, and even hazardous metal powders for 3D printing. Regulated, non-regulated, sanitary, cleanroom, one material stream or multiple streams, sticky, free-flowing, ignitable, we’ve already designed a conveying system to operate in almost every conceivable situation and tested hundreds upon hundreds of materials. So we have a head start when it comes time to quote a new project.

In fact, we’d already tested vitamin C powder. We still highly recommend running a test in our test laboratory with every material to be conveyed for every conveying system but our vast experience cuts down on the trial and error and helps the process move faster. Every day we save in testing means the conveyor arrives a day earlier. It also ensures that when it’s installed, everything works as specified, and keeps working as specified.

Using our pneumatic vacuum conveyors to transfer powdered ingredients to the mixer is a very common installation for us so I pointed out that we could also automatically transfer the finished tablets from the tablet press directly to the bottle filling line or to a container for storage. This creates a sealed system upstream and downstream of the tablet press that prevents contamination and protects the tablets from chipping. And no one has to lift buckets of pills to load the hopper of the tablet counter.

Have we already tested your material? See partial list of materials that move in Volkmann conveyors here.

 

 

 

Growing Nutraceutical Companies Need to Think Like Big Pharma When Buying Equipment

When small nutraceutical companies need to increase production, their owners tend to ask, “What’s the cheapest way to increase production?” Due to cash flow, financing access, uncertainty about the company’s long-term viability, or other issues, the thought process often focuses on meeting the immediate demand – on getting orders out the door – at the lowest cost possible. The initial cost of new (or used) equipment often frames the criteria when investigating solutions.

The big pharmaceutical companies that run the world don’t ask about the cheapest anything. The engineers and other managers at our pharmaceutical company customers ask, “What’s the best way to increase production?” Or, “What’s the best way to transfer powders from storage into the process?”

When investigating an equipment purchase, their criteria considers cost, of course, but it’s usually not at the top of the list. Big pharma focuses first on achieving the desired product quality at maximum efficiency. Then they look at items like worker safety, maintenance needs, longevity, compliance with FDA regulations, and payback period, among others. When arriving at the best way to specify equipment for a given project, the best way wouldn’t be excluded based solely on cost. Sure, these industry giants enjoy access to virtually unlimited budgets that smaller, growing companies simply do not. But by focusing on initial cost, growing companies may overlook the best way and end up installing a system that only solves the problem temporarily, or only solves part of the problem while creating other problems.

A new, lowest cost belt conveying system, for example, may increase production rates versus manual bag handling yet create a bottleneck upstream due to downtime for cleaning and maintenance that actually slows overall line speed. Or, this open conveyor may expose ingredients to the plant environment and invite contamination that shows up in quality testing. Or, the powdered ingredients may contribute to fugitive dust and nuisance dust in the workplace – even low volumes of ignitable powders can invite combustible dust explosions. Sometimes the cheaper approach just doesn’t last more than a year or two, and after a series of chronic maintenance headaches, it finally needs to be scrapped – back to square one.

The best way to avoid these pitfalls is to find the best way to solve the problem for each, individual process. This may mean automation. It may mean hiring. In terms of powder transfer for pharmaceutical and nutraceutical ingredients, the best way is typically a pneumatic vacuum conveying system. This way, the ingredients are gently transferred from storage to discharge into the process within enclosed, dust-tight piping for protection from contamination and from explosions. It’s far safer and easier than manually carrying 55 lb. sacks up a mezzanine for dumping into a mixer.

By adopting the thought process of these global pharmaceutical giants, smaller, growing nutrition companies can meet demanding quality requirements at high production rates yet run a safer, more efficient, and more profitable operation.

Learn more about the best way to convey bulk materials here.