Modernizing its resin filtration system enabled Neville Chemical to make significant productivity gains, reduce waste, and eliminate a laborious task that was risky to workers' health.
When the company opened its Anaheim, Calif., plant in 1958, its major competitors in the burgeoning hydrocarbon resin industry were domestic giants such as Eastman and Exxon. Neville Chemical makes a variety of hydrocarbon resins for applications such as printing inks, e.g., coumarone-indene resins, adhesives and various coatings. Today, with a strong lineup of Asian competitors, the market has become much more competitive, particularly for smaller, family-owned manufacturers like Pittsburgh, Pa.-based Neville.
"With all of the competitive forces out there, productivity and safety are essential to our survival," says Rob Lonergan, general manager of the Anaheim plant. "Of course, given cost and labor issues plaguing the California manufacturing environment today, those challenges have become even more critical here."
The filters became a focus for improving our process. "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 has used a variety of different systems for filtration of impurities from its finished resin products for many years. While filter bags performed well in removing impurities from resin, they were costly, required continual changing that interrupted production, was a difficult task for workers and also potentially hazardous.
All of those problems were completely eliminated when Neville replaced that bag filter system with a state-of-the-art self-cleaning Eco Filter system from Russell Finex (www.russellfinex.com) of Pineville, N.C.
The bag filters in question were located on the molten resin line, where the resin material is heated to 400°F to 500°F to permit flow. After being filtered, the resin goes through a flaking process and becomes solidified and then packaged.
The combination of the heat of the resin and build-up of contaminants causes filtration bags to load up and decompose to the point that they have to be changed at regular intervals. "Unfortunately, those intervals require stopping resin product flow before a batch is complete," Lonergan explains.
In contrast, the Eco Filter is a self-cleaning system that integrates directly into the pipeline and completely eliminates the need to change filtration bags. A spiral wiper design ensures the filter element is kept continuously clean, and so maintains optimum efficiency. Because of its self-cleaning design, cleaning of the filter between batch runs is quick and easy with minimal disruptions during production changeovers.
The totally enclosed Eco Filter prevents pollutants from outside the system from contaminating the product, and protects the operators from harmful fumes and spillage. This filter also features the Russell Filter Management System, to continuously monitor the filtration system, thereby enabling the filter to be operated efficiently without operator involvement.
Figure 2. Filter at Neville plant