Jacob air conveying system adds high flexibility to snack plant

Tayto Group benefited from Jacob's tubing skills.

Firing Industries supplies modular tubing systems by Jacob, known for making processing plants run more smoothly and efficiently. Recently, Jacob was involved in a project for a major snack manufacturer in the United Kingdom. The customer, Tayto Group, needed a custom air conveying system to transport numerous pack formats to their own respective multi-packing machines. Here is how Jacob used the advantage of modular design to optimize facility layout with this solution.

Largest installation of its kind

As the U.K.’s largest family-owned manufacturer of chips and other snack foods, Tayto owns a factory in Scunthorpe, England that produces more than 2,000,000 packs per day – products from 18 to 175 grams, packed either as single bags or multi-packs. Air-conveying systems like the one Jacob designed for Tayto have become common among snack makers for the flexibility it provides for facility design and layout.

This Tayto air conveying system is believed to be the largest installation of its kind in the U.K. It is made of 200-millimetre-diameter thin-walled 19-gauge thick stainless steel tubes, each up to two metres long and with a precision-machine-lipped end designed to accept a Keltan U-shaped gasket and pull ring connector for an airtight connection. The bidirectional air-conveying lines have speed controls to cater to variations in product weight. Installation was fast, with little interruption of company operations.

Most of this air conveying system is high above the plant floor, yet still accessible. The tube sections feed products to multiple packing lines up to 44 metres from where the snacks are packaged. The system saves space and has more flexibility in how it feeds packing lines than conventional mechanical conveyors do. The connections let earthing continuity to eliminate static electricity, and the entire system is built to optimize product flow. A pressure-certified connection provides electrical conductivity with ATEX compliance.

Jacob modular tubing is always perfect for creating efficient, flexible material-handling systems that can adapt to changing needs. With the help of Firing Industries, Jacob tubing can provide ideal solutions for Canadian snack manufacturers too.

To learn more, contact Firing Industries’ application-sales engineers at ddubuc@firing.com or (877) 688-0974.

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