Chemical News

“With all of the competitive forces out there, productivity and safety are essential to our survival,” says Rob Lonergan, GM of Neville Chemical’s Anaheim plant.

A recognized leader in synthetic hydrocarbon resins and coumarone-indene resins, Neville Chemical determined that updating its resin filtration system with a state-of-the-art system on the finished goods line would improve productivity and reduce waste.

“The call to upgrade our filtration on the solid resin line was beneficial in several ways,” Lonergan says. “It not only enabled us to operate leaner through improved productivity and reduced waste, but also led us to vastly reduce the health and safety hazards that were present with our old system.”

Neville Chemical has used a variety of different systems for filtration of impurities from its finished products for many years. While filter bags performed well in removing impurities, the use of these bags was costly, required continual changing that interrupted production, was a difficult task for workers, and was also potentially hazardous.

All of those problems were completely eliminated when Neville Chemical replaced that bag system with a state-of-the-art self-cleaning Eco Filter® system from Russell Finex (www.russellfinex.com) of Pineville, North Carolina.

Neville Chemical’s bag filters in question were located on the molten resin line, where the material is heated to 400-500 degrees Fahrenheit in order to permit flow. After being filtered, it goes through a flaking process and becomes solidified and then packaged.

The combination of the heat and build-up of contaminants causes these bags to load up and decompose so they must be changed at regular intervals. “Unfortunately, those intervals require stopping product flow before a batch is complete,” Lonergan explains.

Manufactured by Russell Finex, the Eco filter is a self-cleaning system that integrates directly into the pipeline and completely eliminates the need to change bags. By means of a unique spiral wiper design, the filter element is kept continuously clean, which ensures optimum efficiency of filtration. The systems also has a unique Q-Tap valve that allows the sampling of freshly filtered material without interrupting production. This resulted in substantial savings of both downtime and labor.

Due to the heat and “stickiness” of the resin, changing bags had also been difficult, messy and potentially dangerous. “Each bag was about three feet long, and they became quite cumbersome when full. If the person changing the bags spilled, it could stick and possibly burn. The new system completely eliminates that risk,” says Lonergan.

“Too often the workers would have to muscle out the bags because they were sticky. So, to some extent the bag changing task was a back injury waiting to happen,” adds Lonergan. “Fortunately, we have not had any serious injuries in this area.”

Lonergan points out that his workers had to also be wary of other risks, such as potential respiratory risks due to heavy fumes from the product. Consequently, bag changers wore face shields, respirators and high temperature gloves.

The totally enclosed Eco Filter now protects the operators from harmful fumes and spillage.

“All of these potential risks have now been eliminated because of the new Russell Finex system,” says Lonergan.