Enormous Energy Savings for Packaging Process

Fresh and ready-to-eat salads, vegetable dishes, herbs, and freshly reduce fruit form part of Gartenfrisch Jung GmbH’s product portfolio. The long-established company has developed into the German market leader for fresh comfort merchandise thanks to its high quality and experience. Since early 2019, the vacuum provide to its tray sealer packaging machines has been exceptionally energy-efficient following the set up of a central vacuum system by Busch Vacuum Solutions.
Gartenfrisch Jung produces its convenience foods in a contemporary facility in Jagsthausen, a town in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. To allow it to supply contemporary uncooked produce all 12 months round, the corporate has its personal growers in Germany and Portugal. Cultivation in two completely different climate zones ensures that the whole product vary may be supplied year-round, sold to finish users across Germany through supermarket chains and discount stores. The ready-to-eat salads are packaged into bowls beneath the company’s own label, as well as for third get together manufacturers. Gartenfrisch Jung’s history dates back to 1795. What started out as a small piece of farmland has now transformed into integrated, controlled growers of salads and greens and one other arm for processing these products. As ไดอะแฟรม ซีล , Gartenfrisch Jung has been handed from one era to the next ever because it started. The expertise gained as a result has subsequently grown steadily, resulting in the company’s profitable growth and a high quality normal of its products. Nowadays, Gartenfrisch Jung processes a hundred and twenty tonnes of uncooked food every single day. This is equivalent to handling 2,000 pallets, which are then delivered to customers by 80 refrigerated automobiles.
The ready-to-eat salad dishes (Fig. 1) are packaged on twelve packaging lines with tray sealer packaging machines. In the past, these packaging machines were geared up with one rotary vane vacuum pump each, although one machine had two vacuum pumps. These 13 vacuum pumps were used to evacuate the trays to the required vacuum stage previous to sealing. A two-shift operation is in place on all twelve packaging traces. The vacuum pumps ran continually throughout these shifts, other than throughout breaks. During a third shift, the manufacturing facilities are cleaned while all machinery is stationary.
Jochen Neff, who is in control of expertise at Gartenfrisch Jung, was looking for another vacuum provide, as a outcome of the heat radiated by the thirteen vacuum pumps was putting a strain on the air con system in the production facilities, that are cooled to between 5 and 6 levels Celsius. Furthermore, the vacuum pumps had an installed motor output of over 50 kilowatts. The vacuum specialists from Busch Vacuum Solutions analyzed the scenario and beneficial a centralized vacuum supply, which could be set up in a non-air-conditioned room outside the manufacturing amenities.
Because Jung’s comfort merchandise have the ideal vacuum for packaging at a vacuum level of four hundred millibars, Busch recommended using MINK claw vacuum pumps. This type of vacuum pump has the very best effectivity factor out of all mechanical vacuum pumps. This is a result of their contact-free working principle, which signifies that the shifting parts contained in the vacuum pump do not come in contact with each other. In flip, no oil-based lubrication is required and all maintenance work related to using oil as an working fluid is eliminated.
Busch designed a vacuum system with three frequency-controlled MINK claw vacuum pumps (Fig. 2), every of which was geared up with a motor with a nominal motor ranking of 8 kilowatts. However, one of the three vacuum pumps is completely on stand-by. Nevertheless, the control system is programmed to ensure that all three vacuum pumps have the identical number of working hours.
Centralizing the vacuum provide enabled the whole put in motor ranking to be lowered from 50.2 to sixteen kilowatts (Fig. 3) if we assume that two of the vacuum pumps run at 60 Hertz, i.e. maximum power. This would correspond to a sixty eight p.c discount in energy consumption. However, in practice Jochen Neff has found that solely one of the two MINK claw vacuum pumps is normally in use and that this tends to run at a lowered rotational velocity. After a quantity of months of use, Jochen Neff has measured common power consumption of four kilowatt hours for the entire vacuum supply. This is mainly linked to the fact that the twelve packaging lines do not all always run at maximum velocity and never all the machines are in use on an everyday basis. The demand-based control system then decreases the rotational pace to scale back the output, that means that the system only offers the performance that’s actually required. In practice, this equates to energy savings of over 90 percent for vacuum technology.
The new centralized vacuum system was installed in April 2019 and has been in use each since. It is linked to the packaging machines through a community of pipelines. Two upstream vacuum vessels with a quantity of 1,500 liters every ensure that the required vacuum stage is on the market within the packaging chambers as soon as it’s wanted in the packaging cycle. Removing the thirteen unique vacuum pumps from the production areas relieved strain from the air con system. This meant that the air conditioning system might be turned right down to keep the room temperature between 5 and 6 degrees Celsius. The financial savings in vitality costs as a result of reducing the air con output haven’t been measured. However, it may possibly generally be assumed that the change resulted in a significant reduction in the power consumed by the air conditioning system.
Thanks to the vacuum system’s redundant design, upkeep may be carried out on the person MINK claw vacuum pumps during manufacturing and packaging. MINK claw vacuum pumps are almost maintenance-free. Maintenance is limited mainly to the annual preventive change in gear oil. This is carried out by a Busch service technician. With the centralized vacuum system, Jochen Neff has created a extremely energy-efficient, reliable and economical vacuum provide for packaging his comfort merchandise.
Fig: 1: One of twelve traces used to package deal comfort merchandise on tray sealers

Fig. 2: Vacuum system with three MINK claw vacuum pumps throughout assembly with the two vacuum vessels in the background

Fig. three: Comparison of energy consumption for a decentralized and centralized vacuum provide

Image rights: Busch Vacuum Solutions

Busch Vacuum Solutions

Global Marketing – Uli Merkle

10 March 2020

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