Developing In-House Batching System for Zupreem Material Handling Project
Situation: For over 40 years, Zupreem has understood that the single most important influence on an animal’s health is nutrition. Zupreem sells dry food for all sorts of birds and small animals like rabbits, guinea pigs, and ferrets. These dry materials needed to be efficiently sorted and packaged to quickly fulfill the demand for their product. However, many of their products in the past were blended and packaged offsite by contract packing firms. This was not only costly, but put their production and timing out of their control. In 2009, they elected to bring this ingredient batching system in-house. Zupreem hired FormPak to develop a solution for them and design a system for handling their materials and products.
Scope: To solve this problem for Zupreem, FormPak manufactured and provided all the material handling and recipe management systems. This project was expanded in 2010 to include (3) additional ingredients.:
Here are the ingredient batching systems and overall material handling solution that FormPak developed for Zupreem:
- 1 Recipe management, retrieval, and programming system (HMI)
- 7 Hoist & Trolley style bulk bag unloaders
- 1 Bag break and box dump station
- 7 Vibratory tray feeders with screening beds
- 1 Slider bed style cleated belt conveyor
Solution: The system FormPak manufactured and developed meters the materials volumetrically via vibratory feeders (with 100/1 turndown or percentage of batch control) onto the cleated belt conveyor according to the recipe that has been selected. Products are “mixed” proportionally by layering onto the belt, then up to a distribution/mixing head above the bagging line.
Manufacturing Dry Material & Convey System Solution for Clean Biodiesel Production
Situation: Green Power Inc., a division of Clean Energy Projects, was in the process of scaling-up a new biodiesel production plant. Their unique municipal waste to biodiesel process offers the promise of clean biodiesel production from a feed stock that is nearly unlimited.
One of the challenges was to convey the raw material (processed municipal waste called “fluff”) that was likened to cellulous up 40’ and onto a 150’ belt conveyor to the inlet of a reactor vessel. The infeed, however, needed to accommodate the introduction of (2) additional dry materials (lime and zeolite).
Scope: FormPak provided design and construction of a dry material metering and conveying system consisting of the following equipment:
- 1 Large vibratory feeder for the Fluff material
- 2 Small vibrator feeders for the minor additives
- 1 Interlocking bucket elevator
- 1 Slider belt conveyor
- 2 Loss-In-Weight fork loaded bulk bag unloaders
Solution: The specially developed system meters the fluff into the bucket elevator. As it passed under the two bulk bag unloaders, the minor materials are sprinkled onto the fluff via loss-in-weight batching controls. The materials are then elevated 40’ to the belt conveyor for delivery into the reactor.
