Industrial Equipment News

DEC 2016

IEN (Industrial Equipment News) is the leading resource for industrial professionals, providing product technology, trends and solutions impacting the industrial market. IEN reaches manufacturers, designers, distributors & supply chain professionals.

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Trial Offers problem solvers Problem Solvers IEN / DECEMBER '16 9 www.ien.com Heavy Duty Vacuum Disintegrates Safety Concerns, Unscheduled Downtime E liminating manual material handling has some of the biggest potential to improve a company's productivity, product quality and overall business competitiveness. And just as safety and health programs are unique to each operation, the ROI of effec- tive ergonomic interventions is also unique to each organization. There are, however, key areas where potential savings regularly occur when implementing a heavy-duty vacuum. Beyond the elimination of ergonomic hazards and injury costs, savings can be found in increased uptime, reduced manpower, increased productivity, improved product quality and a healthier, cleaner environment. When Cianbro wanted to eliminate an ergonomic hazard in which workers manually removed steel shot from an auger system connected to a cabinet-style blast machine at its 40,000-square-foot fabrication and coating facility in Georgetown, Mass., Safety, Health & Environmental Supervisor Kris Chipman researched methods to eliminate man- ual handling of the heavy material. Cianbro operates in more than 40 states across a diverse range of markets self-per- forming civil and structural projects from building bridges, to operating fabrication and coating facilities, and working in power plants and paper mills. The Georgetown facility fabricates structural steel beams for bridge and building proj- ects. Many of these projects begin with beams moving, via a conveyor system, through the cabinet-style blast machine where steel beads (called shot) shoot at the beam to remove rust and mill scale in preparation for welding or painting. Once the steel shot hits the beam, it drops down into an auger system that reclaims and feeds the material back into the blast machine for reuse over and over again. The sandblasting process is taxing on machinery; and, when inherent breakdowns oc- cur workers must remove all blast media from the system to perform maintenance. On those occasions, two workers spent eight hours sweeping and shoveling the steel shot into drums and, using a drum dolly, manually moved them from the production fl oor. Focused on safety, the goal was to alleviate the ergonomic issues of shoveling heavy media in a tight space and manually moving heavy drums. In researching for solutions Chipman had seen some big shop-type vacs and thought something like that might work. Chipman turned to Belleville, New Jersey-based VAC-U-MAX, a manufacturer with application expertise in the handling of over 10,000 bulk materials including cast iron, steel, aluminum chips, sludge powders, fl akes, granules, pellets and various others. The company manufactures industrial vacuum cleaners for manufacturing and municipal fa- cilities as well as government installations and environmental sites to improve cleanliness, working conditions and safety. To handle the heavy blast media, the vacuum needed to be designed for high volume recovery in an industrial setting, and the 15Hp 1020MFS continuous duty vacuum was the ideal solution to eliminate workers needing to go down into a three-foot-deep trench with limited space and awkward footing to shovel and scoop heavy blast media. Even though the unit is capable of recovering up to fi ve tons per hour and designed to pick up heavy materials including steel shot, foundry sand, metal powders, sludges and other materials similar in nature, Chipman wanted fi nal assurance that the vacuum could pick up their particular blast media. "This is heavy stuff," says Chipman. "Each 55-gallon drum weighs approximately 2,000 pounds and from the beginning we weren't sure if what we wanted to do was even pos- sible. So we sent VAC-U-MAX a sample of the shot media, they did some testing, and guaranteed it would work for us." Si nce acquiring the vacuum, the facility has cut the labor required to empty the machine by more than 50 percent. The task of emptying the pit, which used to take eight hours utilizing two workers, now takes one worker three hours. "Now we can shut it down in the morning, vacuum it out and have it repaired all in the same day, using one person," says Chipman. "The re- duced labor on mainte- nance, which is something that can't be billed, is now redistributed to work hours on a project that is billable."

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