Air treatment

A longstanding food industry giant has collaborated with air movement specialist Fanquip to ensure air quality at one of its major plants.

Located in Victoria, the multi-hectare site is responsible for a large range of the multinational's food and beverage products. It encompasses facilities for making and packing soups, a glass plant for bottled fruit juice manufacture and packaging, and a snack plant division that makes potato chips.

With most processes involving cooking or some level of heating, steam is a common by-product and this has to be extracted quickly. Several recent fitouts of fans by Fanquip took the tally to 15 units to ensure the air environment is properly regulated.

A Fanquip technical consultant found that heat and steam from cooking processes were not the only factors requiring a solution. Two of the more recently installed fan units were for an ammonia section to provide continuous extraction. This ammonia is used for refrigeration purposes, and insurance companies require adequate ventilation for this type of process as there is always a very rare potential for leaks.

But this is just one aspect of a complete project that called for a variety of items to facilitate the various sections at this very large business. For example, two large 600 mm wall plate exhaust fans, with safety guards, are capable of extracting 3200 L of air and steam per second. These have optional galvanised rollover cowl and gravity closing louvres.

Other items installed at this plant include a 900 mm vertical discharge roof fan working at 960 rpm capable of 10,000 L/s of air movement; a mid-pressure centrifugal fan, operating at 2840 rpm that can handle 1400 L/s; a dust collector with pleated cartridge filter at 2800 rpm moving 560 L/s.

These recent inclusions complement what has been an ongoing project that has seen a progressive introduction of fans to meet the growth of business and increasing production.