A German wine producer has improved its productivity by retrofitting an anti-corrosion chain on its conveyor system. The company invested in a Tsubaki Neptune chain that has increased service life and reduced downtime with less frequent replacement and maintenance requirements. The upgraded chain has also reduced the total cost of ownership.

The upgraded chain has also reduced the total cost of ownership. A wine producer in Germany bottles the wine and uses a series of conveyors to transport the bottles through the production process. At the end of the system, the bottles are buffered and accumulated on a spiral conveyor. The spiral conveyor is driven by a roller chain, however as it’s a wet environment the chains rapidly corrode and become subject to high friction. This results in a short wear life.

The chain’s position is difficult to reach from a maintenance perspective and, because of the wet environment, relubrication is difficult. With an irregular lubrication regime combined with the corrosive conditions, the conveyor’s chain required replacement every two years. Frequent chain replacement increased procurement costs and, because of the chain’s difficult to access location, it also increased downtime, reducing the wine producer’s productivity.

The wine producer replaced the spiral conveyor’s chain with Tsubaki Neptune, designed for use in corrosive environments. The Neptune has significantly outlasted the two-year service life of the previous chain and has already reduced the total cost of ownership. Crucially, the chain’s extended service life has minimised downtime with less frequent replacement and servicing, which has also reduced the time and cost of maintenance.

Tsubaki says that its durability is a result of its coating that is applied to provide resistance to corrosion and chemicals. With a two-layer coating including resin covering the links, plates, bushes and pins, the Neptune is tested to withstand 700 hours of saltwater spray. The chain is also tested for 2,000 hours’ resistance against sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide, which are frequently used as cleaning agents in the food and beverage industry. Other anti-corrosion type chains such as stainless-steel variants must make concessions in the strength department. However, the Neptune is a carbon steel chain with the same tensile strength and allowable load as Tsubaki’s standard, hard-wearing roller chains. The special coating also protects against friction, which speeds-up chain wear, by minimising severe dynamic contact between the roller and sprocket.

The treatment to reduce corrosion can create harmful environmental consequences and for the wine producer, it was crucial to avoid these effects. Tsubaki’s Neptune chain is free from harmful hexavalent chromium and other potentially dangerous elements such as arsenic, lead, mercury, or cadmium. As a result, the Neptune chain is RoHS compliant. Because of the anti-corrosion properties, the Neptune chain is frequently used in applications that are subject to frequent and rigorous alkaline cleaning and wet environments. Typically, this includes applications in the food & beverage industry, waste treatment, packaging, and PET bottle sterilisation.

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Anti-corrosion and sealing specialist WINN & COALES INTERNATIONAL reports it held its biennial International Sales Conference in September and says the company, currently enjoying its 134th year of trading, is well known in the world of corrosion prevention for its high quality product brands including Denso, Premier, Protal, Archco, Steelcoat, Premier Shrink Sleeves and SeaShield.

David Bean, solutions manager at Mitsubishi Electric, looks at how digitalisation – through the rise of the Industrial Internet of Things and technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence – is delivering new insights about plant assets, so boosting the potential for predictive maintenance and heralding the arrival of prescriptive maintenance.

Complying with EU standards is one of the key challenges that wastewater treatment plants face. For this reason, more and more water treatment facilities across Europe are investing in ambitious optimisation projects aimed at enhancing energy efficiency and productivity. One example of this is the new wastewater plant that serves the city of Lille, in France. To maximise the new facility’s efficiency, Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies turned to Atlas Copco’s blowers equipped with WEG’s motors and drives.

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