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Food processing applications - challenges to
look out for
When specifying drives and
controls for food processing and manufacturing sites, there are some
common, and some more unusual, challenges.
Find out below how we
created a solution for a door that hadn’t operated properly since the day
it was installed. And see the examples to help you start thinking about
requirements when talking to your customers.
Maintaining door
functionality
Often, food processing sites will have multiple internal doors to
separate different areas of the site. For example, warehousing or storage
from food production. These will run numerous operations each day so
durability of the doors and drives is key.
Minimising heat loss and gain
High speed opening and closing is essential for temperature control.
In a food processing plant, maintaining temperatures in certain areas,
such as cold storage, is crucial. Doors need to be open for a minimum
amount of time to prevent heat gain or loss
Meeting challenging hygiene
standards
In a
plant that processes a variety of foods at the same time, it has to
prevent cross-contamination and maintain a high standard of hygiene to
ensure products are safe for consumers.
In many of the cases
above, our customers specify fabric speed doors for which our Safedrive® Fi is ideal. It was specifically developed
for speed, frequency of use and durability. Exceedingly difficult conditions
Our technical team were recently
tasked to create a solution for a fabric speed door on an industrial steam
washer room in a cream cake factory. This was to replace an existing door
that hadn’t worked properly since it was installed.
Our customer explains: “The washer uses steam to clean trays used in the
cake manufacturing process. The steam quickly condenses on to the walls
and every item within the room, including the door. When the cleaning
process has finished, the floor is hosed down to ensure no deposits of
cream leave the room. The condensation produced rendered the existing door
useless.”
GfA’s Robert Booth says: “The door drives and controls needed to be
capable of fast operation of the door to stop warm vapours escaping into
colder rooms where the cakes are produced and stored, but we quickly
established that the environment was not suitable for the Safedrive® Fi or
conventional high-speed door drives. We needed to look at a solution that
was both water and vapour resistant, above the traditional IP65-rated
protection.”
In answer to similar challenges, GfA has developed IP65i; an enhanced IP65
model rangefor mechanical limit drives. Unlike normal IP65 protection,
IP65i prevents damage caused by the ingress of water vapour, which
condenses out on to the electrical components. IP65 only stops the ingress
of liquid water.
On traditional drive units, the limits are on a circuit board within
a sealed box. The box prevents liquid water getting to the circuit board,
but in high humidity it cannot stop water vapour. Once inside the box the
vapour condenses back to water, soaking the circuit board and causing
electrical damage.
In IP65i drives, all the limit switches are totally encapsulated.
Although vapour can still enter the box, any condensate cannot get to
individual switches or cause them to short circuit with a neighbouring
switch.
The IP65i drive units also have a special corrosion resistant finish
applied to the motor and the gearbox. This is also applied to the
hollowshaft.
Robert continues: “We designed a solution that
incorporated an IP65i-rated high-speed door drive unit sized to the door
in question with an electric motor designed to work off an inverter
control to ensure soft-start and durability. The proprietary inverter
control unit was installed in a special IP65 rated enclosure incorporating
an anti-condensation heater to keep the controls
dry.”
The customer reports that all is now working
fine! | 
