THE CHALLENGES OF TOO MUCH DUST
Midwest PMS is a manufacturer of liquid supplements for livestock that are custom blended per order and shipped to customers in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Their fully automated batching system combines an order’s various ingredients by weight. Other, dry ingredients are added manually and agitated. The combination is then moved to a holding tank and delivered to their customers as requested.
“We had always had our ingredients delivered,” said Kendal Adler, plant manager for Midwest PMS. But as they began to stockpile and transport the ingredients at the facility, loading and unloading began to be problematic. “Calcium, salt, urea… All of our dry ingredients create a tremendous amount of dust,” he continued. “It was tearing up our equipment.” Ingredient mixers, pumps, augers, and trucks began to show signs of premature wear. “Plus, it wasn’t good for the guys working back there,” he added. “You couldn’t see in the building; couldn’t tell what you were doing.”
At another section of the facility, urea is unloaded from a truck to a bin. Baghouses that were used to collect the dust from the bin were performing very poorly. “The bags wouldn’t last a month,” Adler said. For the sake of their employees and machinery, Midwest PMS began to search for a better solution.
CAMFIL'S DUST AND MIST COLLECTORS HELP THEM SEE BEYOND THE CLOUDS
“We had looked to cartridge-based filters before to get rid of the baghouses,” Adler explained. “I’ve never been pleased with the baghouses, but nothing ever worked well enough to justify switching.” They were convinced that the Gold Series ® would work for them after Camfil APC brought the demo unit to Midwest PMS. He continued, “When they showed us the ease of changing the filters and how easy it was to maintain, I was sold. There were a lot of reasons that I really liked that style of filter unit.”
To resolve the dust issue during loading, a GS12 was installed at the source where dry ingredients were causing major dust problems. Ducts were placed above the loading space. alder stated, “My rep came out after we had everything installed, showed me how to program it, got it set up and running, and we’ve been using it ever since.” The unit is run as needed. The Gold Series GS12 has virtually eliminated the clouds of dust that were once present during loading, reducing the maintenance time for the equipment that was being affected by the dust.
At the bin where urea is unloaded, a GS2 was put in place. Adler said, simply, “since we’ve put it in, I haven’t touched it… I love stuff that I don’t have to work on.” He continued, “It was money well spent; low maintenance, and it does what we wanted it to do… It paid for itself in a year.”
Midwest PMS is planning to purchase another Gold Series GS2 unit at another urea unloading bin.
Ireland
