Pure Ingenuity was recently featured in the Fall 2017 edition of ReFINEd Kingston. The whole Magazine can be found here:Â https://issuu.com/refinedkingstonmagazine/docs/refined_kingston_fall_2017_interact/40
The Challenge:
The special products facility of a major pharmaceutical company was manufacturing products using powders in highly toxic concentrations. They needed an efficient way to filter the air exiting the facility to ensure optimal health and safety of the outside environment. The air coming in was not a problem, but the air going out had to be filtered to remove all traces of powdered drugs. The simple solution was to use a HEPA filter, but what would then happen if that filter failed? Therein lay the challenge….
The Solution:
Pure Ingenuity designed a return air plenum that involved a floor-level louvered door to pull the dirty air in, and two sets of HEPA filters within the plenum to make a safe filter system, as air was drawn up and out of the room through the floor-level grill in the plenum. The innovative design featured two filters in series with a sampling system in between that would instantaneously detect filter failure. When trace amounts of the hazardous powder were detected on the “filtered” side of the HEPA filters, the system immediately flagged the failed filter requiring replacement on the monitoring system. In order to bypass the time-consuming task of swapping out difficult-to-access HEPA filters, Pure Ingenuity designed a unique drawer-style easy-in, easy-out system that allowed the filter to be replaced in less than two minutes, with the use of a simple hand wrench tool only.
The Result:
As a result of the new design, the company met strict health and safety regulations, while ensuring minimal downtime in the event of a filter failure.
The Challenge:
In their jelly-filled pastry manufacturing process, a leading food processor was running two lines of pastries into one freezer. One line took up half the width of the freezer door, and the other took up the remaining space. The s-line conveyor system was made up of 6 separate conveyors. The raw pastries coming off the system needed to be physically placed in narrower lines to fit into the freezer, which required 5 people to manually organize the product.
Imagine picking up raw, jelly-filled pastries with your hands – not only was cleanliness an issue, but the pastries were frequently breaking. So if the line was scheduled to run apple pastries in hour-one, and blueberry in hour-two, but a quarter of the apple pastries broke and spilled in the first hour, each conveyor along the line would have to be pulled apart and cleaned separately before the next flavour could be run to avoid cross-contamination. The fabric belt was a challenge to take apart and re-assemble because it had to be tensioned and adjusted after each cleaning.
Our challenge was to design an equipment solution that improved efficiency and cleanliness by eliminating the need for manual handling of the product. Neither the freezer, nor the pastry forming and filling machine could be changed as each was a highly specialized and expensive piece of equipment. So we targeted the conveyor system.
The Solution:
Pure Ingenuity embarked on designing a piece of equipment that would automatically converge the pastries into the right spacing to enter the freezer with no human intervention. Our conveyor solution had to meet several important challenges. First, it had to converge on itself in order to automatically space the pastries. Second, it needed to maintain the s-shape to fit the plant’s layout and production requirements. Third, it needed to be one solid piece of equipment so that the entire conveyor could be cleaned in one simple procedure.
We designed a single-belt, multi-lane converging conveyor with integrated cleaning ability that was simple to take apart and clean. We used a modular plastic conveyor belt, which was not only more sanitary than their old fabric belt, but also easier to take apart and re-assemble because it didn’t need to be tensioned and adjusted.
We also designed an automatic washing system with a self-contained spray unit and a catch-basin underneath, which cleaned the belt on every return revolution. This ensured the belt was automatically cleaned between every single product run.
The Result:
Now our client has one piece of equipment with a centre lane and two outside lanes that narrow down on each other, forming and lining the pastries into the correct spacing to enter the freezer with no human intervention. It’s a cleaner, more efficient and effective process that exceeds food safety regulations and saves our client money.
“Today, we have no more stops in production for cleaning. Eliminating human intervention in our process has improved cleanliness and reduced labour costs, while freeing our operators to focus purely on quality control. In the end, we produce a higher quality product, much more efficiently than before.” – Plant Engineer
The Challenge:
The health research centre of a leading U.S. university houses a large animal care facility containing 10,000 cages of various animals used in research. Of course, each animal has to be fed and watered throughout the day, which creates a variety of practical and logistical challenges.
From the time, effort and cost involved in keeping the animals healthy and hydrated, to the challenge of keeping the cages clean, dry and comfortable, the managers of this facility are always looking for new and better ways to be efficient and control costs while meeting strict standards for cleanliness and care.
The facility recognized it had an unsustainable challenge in the requirement to manually deliver 10,000 bottles of food and water to their animal cages every week; each of which had to be cleaned, sanitized and refilled after every use. There were two significant problems with the process. First, the high labour cost content involved in preparing 10,000 bottles per week with no automated system; second, a percentage of these bottles were leaking into the cages and creating health issues for the animals.
The Solution:
The director of animal care had an idea to improve the efficiency of feeding and watering these animals by utilizing an automated packaging system and switching from a liquid to a gel form of hydration, which would eliminate the leakage problem. The gel was tested in a small animal population with positive results. Now, he needed a system to automatically batch, package the hydrating gel for easy delivery to the facility’s animal population.
The facility was certainly big enough that automating this process would save major time and money, but not big enough to justify a multi-million dollar industrial equipment product. So the question was how to automate batching, packaging and delivery of the hydration gel in an economical and flexible manner.
After obtaining several quotations for expensive industrial packaging machines, the director realized that a custom-made equipment solution was not only the best way to get exactly what he needed, it was also the most cost-effective solution to his challenge.
He approached Pure Ingenuity Inc. for a customized solution that would better fit his facility and his budget. We came up with a relatively simple, custom solution that would lower the facility’s per-package costs, while eliminating the problem of leakage into the animal cages by integrating a bagging machine with an automated batching system of our own design. Our automated bagging system was based on a PLC-controlled vessel that heats water and allows addition of a gelling agent. When in operation, the mixture is pumped to an automated bagging machine that packages the water-gel mixture. After refrigeration, the semi-solid water and gelatin mixture eliminates the leakage problem.
The Result:
The automated machine now requires only one operator and reduces the time required to create 10,000 bags per week. As an added advantage, the new PLC-controlled mixing vessel is accurate enough to largely eliminate human error in mixing tightly controlled trial batches of new ingredients, medicine, and other additives.
Flexibility – Pure Ingenuity’s automated system was flexible enough that our client could set their own temperatures, ingredients, mixing times and batch numbers.
Cost-efficiency – Not only did our solution cost a fraction of what the client was quoted by industrial machine producers, we also dramatically lowered the per unit cost from $1 per bag to 18 cents per bag.
Reduced labour – The use of inexpensive, single-use packages, packaged and delivered automatically, means there is no human intervention required to feed the animals, and no more bottles to clean, sanitize and re-fill.
“Our strength is building high-quality, cost-effective equipment solutions that you can’t buy off the shelf. In this case, our custom solution not only perfectly addressed our client’s challenge, it saved them a ton of money,” says Pure Ingenuity Inc. project manager Jonathan Toelle.
“Not only did Pure Ingenuity develop an innovative equipment solution, they really worked well with us to understand our facility and our unique challenges. They customized something that was effective, cost-efficient and that would save a lot of time and money over the long-term.” – Animal Care Director
The Challenge:
Our client, a large Canadian health and beauty product manufacturer, had a challenge flowing an array of products, from sunscreen to mouthwash, from their 17-tank mixing room into their packaging facilities. Each of the 17 tanks contained a different product, and there were only 6 lines running out to packaging.
Each packaging line was deliberately capable of packaging multiple products of similar consistency and format, and the client had to maintain this flexibility for efficiency and competitiveness; after all, the more products they could package within their facilities, the more contracts their plant could win.
Each of the 17 tanks had a pump on the bottom that connected to the packaging facility via 60-foot rubber hoses. These hoses ran along the floor and across walkways, which was causing confusion, as well as safety issues. And, because there were only 6 lines out of the room, each hose had to be cleared of residual product and cleaned before being connected to a different tank and piping out the next product.
Our client needed a cleaner, more efficient piping system that would fully drain along all points, recoup all product out of the line, be flexible and interchangeable (17 tanks would still share 6 lines out to packaging), provide quick and easy clean-in-place capability, and most important, that would better comply with strict FDA and GMP standards.
The Solution:
Pure Ingenuity designed and installed a centralized flow-diversion board and sanitary stainless steel piping system that connected all 17 tanks to all 6 product-packaging lines. Our key challenges were to satisfy the production matrix while minimizing construction costs, and maximizing simplicity and ease of use for operators. And, the piping system needed to fit within a limited space while still providing ample access for operators.
Pure Ingenuity took detailed measurements of the production room and mapped the location of all the tanks, pipes and other targets, which revealed all the barriers and connection locations. We then developed a solid model to demonstrate the optimal piping and flow-board configuration within the space so our client could see the system would work before anything was built. Once that model was validated, constructed and installed the entire piping system on site within the facility.
The Result:
Now all 17 tanks are connected to one central flow-diversion board via sanitary stainless steel tubing. The system has improved sanitation, dramatically reduced downtime for cleaning, provided operators with a much safer, more intuitive system to operate, and brought the facility up to industry leading standards of regulatory compliance.
Pure Ingenuity is the subject of a feature article in the latest issue of Canadian Fabricating and Welding:Â Pure Ingenuity adds to fabricating sophistication with 14-axis press brake.
