Neil Anderton, Hydraulics & Industrial Director at fluid metering technology specialist Slack & Parr, explores how precision gear pumps can offer ultimate control in food and drink manufacturing
For most food and drink manufacturers, particularly in high-volume markets, delivering identical products time and time again is essential for maintaining consumer experience and brand reputation. The way in which liquid ingredients are delivered into a food and drink processing line fundamentally impacts standardisation and repeatability in the end product, and fluid metering pumps have a vital role to play.
This part of the manufacturing process is typically controlled by an in-line pump which doses liquid ingredients into a recipe or a mixture onto a product line. Traditionally, food and drink manufacturers have employed standard industrial pumps to move liquids through a process. However, in recent years and as part of the industry’s focus on achieving greater levels of accuracy and process efficiency, growing numbers of manufacturers are incorporating high precision gear metering pumps into their processing lines as a reliable and effective solution.
Slack & Parr has been designing and manufacturing metering pumps for over eighty years and is the global market leader in the supply of specialist pumps to multiple industries around the world, including food and drink, pharmaceuticals, manmade fibres, and oil and gas.
In collaboration with manufacturers across the food and drink industry, from chocolate and confectionary to spreads and desserts, we recently launched a new range of high-precision, food-safe gear metering pumps that are designed to give manufacturers ultimate control of a wide range of different viscosity fluids.
The Pulseless Flow range of pumps has been developed to provide the industry with a specialist alternative to standard pumps, including reciprocating, peristaltic or diaphragm pumps, which are commonly used in food and drink processing but aren’t designed to achieve the high levels of precision that gear pumps can offer.
Crucially, gear pump technology is engineered to overcome the potential for product inconsistencies caused by small variations, known as pulsation, in the rate and volume of liquid flowing through the pump and into the manufacturing process. This can lead to modest but notable variations in recipe ratios or differences in the way the product looks and is also linked to increased wastage. Slack & Parr’s Pulseless Flow pumps are engineered to eliminate pulsation and deliver constant speed and accuracy of flow with almost zero variation throughout the process, even under high pressure.
By building these pumps from finely engineered, food-safe materials, including stainless steel and special ceramics, we’re able to deliver an extremely high level of dimensional stability, strength and durability alongside unmatched levels of precision. Like all our technologies, these pumps are built around hardened steel involute gears which are machined to precise tolerances of one or two microns. This results in extremely small clearances – measuring significantly less than a human hair – between the gear and mating components, ensuring almost no internal slip even at high pressures.
Alongside our single-outlet designs, which benefit from off-the-shelf delivery times, we’ve also developed a range of custom-designed, multiple-outlet gear pumps which are ideally suited to a wide variety of food and drink applications and offer considerable cost and efficiency benefits.
Multiple-outlet or planetary gear pumps have been commonplace for many years in other specialised industries, such as manmade fibres, but are still relatively unknown among food and drink manufacturers, although we expect them to play an important in the future of the industry. Planetary pumps provide multiple, identical fluid outlets from a single piece of equipment. Crucially, they only need one drive system to power them, so not only do they enhance processing efficiency and consistency they can also lead to significant machinery cost and space savings.
The operational and business benefits of using planetary pump technology have recently been shown in our work with a leading manufacturer of fruit-based products. When we began working together, the company was using a machine producing 32 streams of product from 32 individual metering heads. This approach was creating recurrent drive and control problems as well as product inconsistencies and quality issues. Working in close collaboration with the company’s engineering team, we developed a fully customised, multiple stream solution that would take the process and the business to a new level of operational efficiency. We supplied the company with four eight-outlet planetary pumps which we combined with a custom-designed manifold system to precisely manage each individual output or flow and deliver it to the exact required position for the next part of the process. Overnight, product variation dropped from around 40% across all 32 streams to +/- 1%. Since that first installation, the company has now converted all its production lines to our planetary gear pumps with the installation of 24 more pumps across its food processing plant.
For more information, visit www.slackandparr.com
