Case Study

Mains Water Intake

Industry
Food & Beverage

Site
Charm haven, NSW, Australia

Application
Factory Mains Water Intake

Problem Description
Customer experienced occasional breakthroughs of dirt and corrosion product in the mains water intake. At both production facilities, building 1 and 3, this caused risk of food contamination, unscheduled shutdowns and significant production losses.

A filtration solution was sought to ensure a clean water supply to the production processes at all times. It was important that the filtration systems would stop 100% of all particles over 35 microns (absolute filtration), to control the risks and reduce losses.

The system should operate automatically, stand-alone, without supervision to minimize the demands on the maintenance department.

The systems should have the capacity to handle from the current flow rate of around 60 LPM to 150% of this, or 90 LPM, in view of future production capacity increases.

Imatech Solution
A Zero Gravity Filters - Pneumatic Phoenix” filter was installed on the water intake at each building.
The ZGF Phoenix is a PLC controlled, automatic self-cleaning filter suitable for a wide range of flow rates. The system has a very small footprint of less than 0.5 sqm and has a fully stainless steel 304 wetted parts construction.

The reliability of the system makes it particularly suitable for full-flow and critical applications such as in this food plant.

The Results
Having these filters in place, the production process is protected from contaminated water. Assuming 3 contamination events per year, each lasting 3 hours, and assuming a total loss (product-, and downtime) of A$10K/hr for each building per event, the savings realized are around A$180,000 per year for the site. We believe these estimates to be conservative.
The additional important benefit of controlling the risk associated with food contamination by the process water is a very critical improvement in this process, but hard to quantify.