Food Industry Case Study: Pet Food Manufacturer

Expel is the perfect tool to reduce the environmental impact of your site as it makes far more efficient use of energy.

About the customer

This client has a diverse and expanding portfolio of confectionery, food, and pet care products and services. With $40 billion in annual sales, they produce some of the world’s best-loved brands and take care of half of the world’s pets through their pet health services.

Project Background

Compressed air is a notoriously wasteful utility. At this site, the engineering team are very keen to introduce measures to reduce the environmental impact of the site and make their manufacturing processes as sustainable as possible.

Prior to installing Expel, the site was using traditional compressed air filters to control moisture in compressed air lines. However, these ordinary compressed air filters were creating unnecessary wastage in a variety of ways:

In order to maintain these standard filters, the engineering team were having to regularly replace and dispose of the internal elements. These elements then end up on a landfill site, creating wastage.

As the pressure bar drop of the filters previously used was around 1 bar per filter, which increases as they are used because they retain any moisture and dirt collected, this means that these filters become less energy efficient with use as they require a higher volume of compressed air to pass through the filter as the elements become saturated.

The performance of standard filters also drops over time, hence the frequent part replacement. Optimum performance of these filters is never more than 60-80% efficiency which deteriorates with use. This means that the equipment at the site was never protected as well as it could be. The Filling and Sealing Engineer at the site identified two compressed air lines which were experiencing moisture issues, both of which were leading to two dump units, which required frequent maintenance and part replacement when exposed to damaging liquid water. Damaged pneumatic equipment then needs to be thrown away, creating yet more wastage.

Why did this company choose Expel?

The Area Engineer and Filling and Sealing Engineer sought the opportunity to reduce wastage and increase the sustainability at the site.

Expel offers a revolutionary approach to compressed air filtration and is unlike anything else currently on the market. Expel is a high efficiency compressed air filter which uses computational fluid dynamics to instantly pass all liquid water, oil emulsion fluids and solid particulates down to 1 micron through the unit and into an AVG Auto Drain. This means that the performance of Expel does not drop with use and remains 99.999% efficient and does not require ANY replacement filter elements or maintenance to operate.

Furthermore, Expel is far more energy efficient than other solutions to the problem of liquid water, oil emulsion fluids and solid particulates on the market. The pressure bar drop of the Expel unit will never exceeds 0.1 bar and this does not increase with use, meaning energy usage is consistent and unlike an ordinary filter, will not increase as the unit removes the water, oil emulsion and solid particulates from compressed air lines.

Expel is the perfect tool to reduce the environmental impact of your site as it makes far more efficient use of energy.