Chicken factory says goodbye to production stoppages

23 July 2021

The efficiency of a food process is in the selection of the right equipment, and pumps play a large part in that.

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Castle Pumps received an enquiry from a new customer in the UK, a halal chicken factory who were having problems with their existing vertical immersion pump from another supplier. The pump was being used for the transfer of a sludgy chicken waste including blood, feathers and water from a container, and due to this abrasive solid content, it was often clogging multiple times a day.

With the pump regularly going down, the production line was continuously coming to a halt resulting in large amounts of downtime and manual intervention from the employees on site. As the pump was vital to the operation of the factor, the failure of the pump was resulting in large scale costs in both labour and loss of output.

A no-clog solution!

After attending the site to conduct a thorough evaluation of the application and site conditions, Castle Pumps were able to make an informed decision on which pump was needed for the job.

The current installation used a vertical immersion pump meaning there was little room in the pipework, so it was important that the new pump could also be immersed directly into the waste container. To allow the ease of passage of feathers, Castle Pumps oversized the pump giving as much margin for error, as at various points during the production, huge clumps could go through the pump with less fluid content than is ideally recommended for operation. The Azcue VRX vertical immersion pump specified comes with a vortex impeller, allowing the pump to create a vacuum so that large solids can pass through without interfering with the pump’s internals.

The customer received a set of in-depth instructions specifically tailored to the application to avoid at all costs the possibility of the pump clogging. The results of providing a pump suitable for the application and also providing expert technical assistance has allowed the factory to run for over 3 months (and counting) clog free. Previously the unit which was originally on site would only run for a maximum of 24 hours before a clog occurred.

For more information on how your pump can considerably improve the productivity of your process, contact Castle Pumps Ltd.

www.castlepumps.com