Open hopper pump by Seepex makes potato plant safer, efficient

John Brooks Company helped a vegetable processor with a Seepex pump.

Among the many impressive customer success stories that illustrate John Brooks Company Limited’s history is the case of a Southern Ontario vegetable-processing facility that needed a pump solution to deal with potato-peel trims. John Brooks Company recommended a Seepex open hopper pump, which resulted in such benefits as better product quality, higher efficiency, a safer environment for workers, elimination of clogging, higher production, reduced service, and lower maintenance expenses.

Fitted with variable frequency drive

The customer was recycling the trims for animal feed and transferring the feed to outdoor bins, but there were serious issues. The process was labour-intensive and dangerous because the water and potato trims accumulated on the floor, making it very slippery. What the company needed was a solution to boost safety, lower labour costs, and function without adding water, since the trims would be useless for animal feed if too wet.

So the vegetable-processing company got in touch with Wael Bishara, a technical sales representative with John Brooks Company. Bishara reviewed the process and chose the stainless steel BTI Range open hopper pump by Seepex, fitted with a variable frequency drive to control the pump speed, according to the amount of trims that required pumping. The open hopper and auger feed screw design pump could handle viscous-to-semi-solid products with little or no flow, while the stainless steel material eliminated corrosion. Another advantage of this pump: its ability to convey products of varying viscosity that tended to bridge.

Seepex hopper pumps have a conveying capacity of 50 litres per hour and pressures of up to 525 pounds per square inch. The open hopper and auger feed screw are adjustable for every application, to optimize product handling, and fast joint access and plug-in connection results in simple maintenance. To convey products that tend to bridge, the bridge-breaker device has two integrated counter-rotating paddle shafts, and the rectangular feed hopper length can be adjusted to accommodate the operating conditions.

The vegetable-processing company installed the Seepex pump and yielded many benefits.

To learn more about this case study and others, visit the website.

For more information, contact John Brooks Company.

• Tweet