PERMEX DEVELOPS FILL BY KILOGRAM SOLUTION FOR BIG CHEMICAL WORKS

Many companies in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries have benefited from the ability of Permex design engineers to develop filling systems tailored to their exact requirements. Filling accuracy can be controlled by a choice of parameters including weight, volume and mass.

Such a Permex filling system has been developed for the large Ellis & Everard site at Middlesbrough, formerly known as Cargo Fleet Chemicals. Here the company blends and packs a variety of chemical applications including brake fluids and industrial detergents.

Flexibility is the keynote of the Permex system designed for this plant. A wide range of containers are filled here including 45 litre plastic jerrycans, 210 litre plastic drums and several different styles of plastic and stainless steel IBC's. The filling plant is not required to be in constant operation but rather is used to make up orders from the limited stocks held in the blend stock tanks. Accuracy is, however, essential and some ingenuity was required to develop a system which could provide consistent repeatable filling accuracy and cope with the wide ranges of drums and containers.

Two Permex machines are in use at the plant to fill caustic soda and nitric acid dilutions. Each uses a well proven "Panda" filling arm in association with a heavy duty "Jumbo" lifting mechanism with a top filling lance fitted with vapour removal hood.

Accuracy on each filling machine is controlled by means of a stainless steel mass flow meter used in association with a Permex MicroBatch Plus electronic batch controller. The system makes it possible to fill by the kilogram and directly measures mass instead of volume. The pulsed output from the mass flow meter to the MicroBatch unit ensures that batch control falls within a narrow band, equivalent to an accuracy well within + or - 0.5% on containers of 10 litres and above.

Direct on-pallet or freestanding container filling are used at the Ellis & Everard Middlesbrough plant although on-conveyor filling is also an option offered by Permex.

Total versatility is ensured, either Permex machine can fill a pallet of 4 x 200 litre drums in around 10 minutes and then move on to 45 litre containers at about 9 to a pallet which can be filled in 5 minutes. A freestanding IBC of 1000 litres takes 5/6 minutes to fill.

[HomePage][Press Releases Index]

[Top]