Fresh and ready-to-eat salads, vegetable dishes, herbs, and freshly reduce fruit kind a part of Gartenfrisch Jung GmbH’s product portfolio. The long-established company has developed into the German market leader for recent convenience merchandise thanks to its high quality and expertise. Since early 2019, the vacuum provide to its tray sealer packaging machines has been exceptionally energy-efficient following the installation of a central vacuum system by Busch Vacuum Solutions.
Gartenfrisch Jung produces its comfort meals in a contemporary facility in Jagsthausen, a city in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. To permit it to provide recent uncooked produce all yr spherical, the corporate has its own growers in Germany and Portugal. Cultivation in two completely different climate zones ensures that the entire product range may be supplied year-round, sold to finish users across Germany via grocery store chains and discount shops. The ready-to-eat salads are packaged into bowls under the company’s own label, as nicely as for third get together manufacturers. Gartenfrisch Jung’s historical past dates again to 1795. What started out as digital pressure gauge of farmland has now transformed into built-in, managed growers of salads and vegetables and another arm for processing these merchandise. As a family business, Gartenfrisch Jung has been handed from one era to the subsequent ever since it started. The expertise gained as a result has therefore grown steadily, resulting in the company’s successful development and a high quality commonplace of its products. Nowadays, Gartenfrisch Jung processes one hundred twenty tonnes of raw meals every single day. This is equivalent to dealing with 2,000 pallets, that are then delivered to customers by 80 refrigerated autos.
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 have been outfitted with one rotary vane vacuum pump each, though one machine had two vacuum pumps. These 13 vacuum pumps have been used to evacuate the trays to the required vacuum level prior to sealing. A two-shift operation is in place on all twelve packaging lines. The vacuum pumps ran continually all through these shifts, aside from throughout breaks. During a 3rd shift, the manufacturing amenities are cleaned whereas all equipment is stationary.
Jochen Neff, who is in management of expertise at Gartenfrisch Jung, was on the lookout for an alternate vacuum provide, as a outcome of the warmth radiated by the thirteen vacuum pumps was placing a strain on the air conditioning system in the production services, that are cooled to between 5 and 6 degrees Celsius. Furthermore, the vacuum pumps had an installed motor output of over 50 kilowatts. The vacuum consultants from Busch Vacuum Solutions analyzed the situation and recommended a centralized vacuum provide, which could be arrange in a non-air-conditioned room outside the production facilities.
Because Jung’s comfort merchandise have the perfect vacuum for packaging at a vacuum stage of 400 millibars, Busch really helpful using MINK claw vacuum pumps. This sort of vacuum pump has the very best efficiency issue out of all mechanical vacuum pumps. This is a results of their contact-free operating principle, which signifies that the transferring components contained in the vacuum pump don’t are available contact with one another. In flip, no oil-based lubrication is required and all maintenance work related to the use of 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 outfitted with a motor with a nominal motor rating of 8 kilowatts. However, one of the three vacuum pumps is exclusively on stand-by. Nevertheless, the control system is programmed to make sure that all three vacuum pumps have the identical number of working hours.
Centralizing the vacuum provide enabled the entire put in motor ranking to be decreased from 50.2 to 16 kilowatts (Fig. 3) if we assume that two of the vacuum pumps run at 60 Hertz, i.e. most power. This would correspond to a sixty eight p.c reduction in power consumption. However, in practice Jochen Neff has found that only one of the two MINK claw vacuum pumps is normally in use and that this tends to run at a decreased rotational velocity. After a number of months of use, Jochen Neff has measured average energy consumption of 4 kilowatt hours for the whole vacuum provide. This is mainly linked to the reality that the twelve packaging traces don’t all always run at most pace and never all of the machines are in use all the time. The demand-based control system then decreases the rotational speed to scale back the output, that means that the system solely supplies the performance that is truly required. In follow, this equates to power savings of over 90 % for vacuum era.
The new centralized vacuum system was put in in April 2019 and has been in use every since. It is connected to the packaging machines through a network of pipelines. Two upstream vacuum vessels with a volume of 1,500 liters every ensure that the required vacuum level is out there in the packaging chambers as soon as it is needed in the packaging cycle. Removing the thirteen original vacuum pumps from the production areas relieved pressure from the air-con system. This meant that the air con system might be turned right down to maintain the room temperature between 5 and 6 degrees Celsius. The savings in energy costs as a outcome of reducing the air con output have not been measured. However, it can generally be assumed that the change resulted in a big reduction within the power consumed by the air conditioning system.
Thanks to the vacuum system’s redundant design, maintenance may be carried out on the person MINK claw vacuum pumps during production and packaging. MINK claw vacuum pumps are almost maintenance-free. Maintenance is proscribed primarily to the annual preventive change in gear oil. This is carried out by a Busch service technician. With เพรสเชอร์เกจ centralized vacuum system, Jochen Neff has created a highly energy-efficient, reliable and economical vacuum provide for packaging his comfort products.
Fig: 1: One of twelve lines used to package deal comfort products on tray sealers
Fig. 2: Vacuum system with three MINK claw vacuum pumps throughout meeting with the 2 vacuum vessels in the background
Fig. 3: 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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