Continuous improvement is essential not only for the efficiency of the workplace but also for providing our customers with the best possible products and services.
Back in March of 2019, we saw a need for improvement in our manufacturing. We are happy to finally introduce our new animal glue blender.
What is Animal Glue and Why we blend it?
We purchase different grades of animal glue with various viscosity and gram strengths from around the world. Sometimes our formulas call for a specific gram strength glue. With the new blender, we can blend to the specific gram strength needed for our formulas. The added benefit is the standardization of the particle size. Not only does this new blender benefit our processes, but the equipment our customers use in manufacturing has also become more sophisticated calling for specific particle sizes. We are now able to offer our customers more consistent particle sizes.
The old vs. the new
Our old blender system was a vertical auger, you could say it was sufficient, but not efficient. Due to this style of blender, the blend time had to be increased to achieve a well-blended product. The longer it took to blend, the more friction build-up you had. This in turn equaled more heat and more heat created thermal bridging which causes the particles to clump. Due to the size of our old vessel, we were also limited as to what batch sizes we could run. Depending on the size of a customer’s order, multiple batches had to run to fulfill an order.
Our new blender system is a horizontal ploughshare mixer. With this new blender, we have been able to reduce blend time while also increasing the batch sizes. Talk about a win-win. With blending time a fraction of what we had with our old system, we are able to blend more, save energy, and offer a more consistent product.
improved operations
Our new mixer is computer-controlled via an HMI screen. The operator is much better positioned to monitor anything that is happening while blending. With this new system, our customers will receive more stable overall blends with particle sizes being more consistent.
Another part of our new mixer is the product loader. Compared to our old blender, where we had to manually load from the base of the machine, we have installed a screw conveyor to carry the product through our new screening system. From the new screening system, we load the product directly to the blender. Which in turn means it’s basically hands-free! No more straining while loading the product into the blender.
benefits of the blender
- Manual labor decrease
- Energy cost savings
- Increased batch sizes
- More consistent particle sizes
- Faster cycle times
To learn more about animal glue, contact a sales representative today!
