CLIENT
The Client’s Chennai manufacturing facilities faced teething challenges in filtering the smoke from the cold heading process. Cold heading involves reshaping metal wire into the desired shape to make a functioning fastener. The process generates high level of heat and use of neat oil as a cooling media produces a tremendous amount of smoke.
APPLICATION
At peak productivity, the cold heading machines at client’s facility, with 5 spindles, typically formed 30 products per spindle from a 16 mm thick steel wire. The client tried several solutions such as ESPs, media filters from other manufacturers, but were not satisfied with the filtration effectiveness.
The filters of solutions from other manufacturers choked frequently and replacing these led to machine downtime, putting a severe limitation on the client’s efforts to ensure maximum utilization of machines in the Cold Heading process.
When the client wanted to add even more powerful machine for the cold heading process, ensuring highest productivity was one of the biggest concerns. The filtration solution had to effectively handle even higher volume of smoke, compared to its existing machines in the process.
The right-fit solution
The officials at client selected SFS to develop a solution for the new machine as its installations in previous projects had earned a reputation for their effective performance. Before placing the final order, the client’s Process Head visited one of SFS’s client, to understand the filtration performance of the solution designed for a similar process.
The visit helped to get a first-hand experience of the solution’s performance. The smoke-free factory atmosphere delivered by SFS’s solution led to positive feedback and a quick buy-in from all the stakeholders. With an assured right-fit smoke filtration solution from SFS, the client’s team at felt confident about achieving maximum productivity for their newly procured machine.
To decide upon the model of the smoke extractor, SFS’s team studied all the previous installations on similar types of machines or applications. The team also made it a point to understand other factors such as machine dimensions, spindle size etc. to design enclosure size for the smoke extractor.
The Smoke Extractor installed at the client’s facility is one of the largest such installations by SFS in India. Exhaustive trials were conducted to ensure the desired filtration performance and maximum availability for the machine. With SFS’s solutions, the client’s team noticed a much better filtration effectiveness as compared to solutions installed by other manufacturers for a similar process.
Scaling up the benefits
Client’s Management expressed their happiness on the performance of SFS’s smoke extractor. Further, client decided to replace all their existing solutions for smoke filtration on existing machines, provided by other suppliers, with SFS’s solutions. The new installations of smoke extractor were completed over the next couple of months and used existing ducting at the plant to optimize the costs.
BENEFITS
- Clean factory with smoke-free environment
- Maximum uptime and utilization of high-investment machines
- Lesser maintenance meant lesser efforts and costs
- Improved productivity with seamless operations
