Application: Hot brass pressing using graphite oil.
As one of the largest producers of taps and other plumbing fittings in Europe, this company’s main manufacturing plant features a large hot brass pressing facility, incorporating presses of various sizes.
The process involves heating up the long bars of brass to cherry red, cropping to size and inserting them into the presses. Graphite oil is then sprayed onto the component and press to act as a releasing agent. During the pressing operation, large plumes of graphite oil smoke are produced - heavily contaminating the facility.
Existing electrostatic oil smoke filtration units were used to control the smoke, however these units had to be cleaned and serviced every 3 weeks, simply to keep working.
These units proved to be very inefficient, and had allowed the atmosphere in the press shop to deteriorate very badly, causing:
- Extremely poor working conditions
- External environmental problems
- Expensive and very regular maintenance
Scandfilter were approached to help solve these issues as ScandMist had previously been installed on the same application in mainland Europe with excellent results.
A ScandMist MA 350 R unit was installed on a large press and monitored for over a year. The results:
- No maintenance required
- No replacement filters needed
- Collected all the graphite smoke from press
- Discharging air cleaner than that found outside, back into the facility
The whole facility was then fitted with ScandMist units:
- ScandMist MA 100 R (for smaller presses)
- ScandMist MA 200 R (for medium sized presses)
- ScandMist MA 350 R (for large presses, some also handling 2 presses)
ScandMist engineers monitor the facility once per year and produce a report which can then be used by the company as part of their risk assessment.
The whole work force - operators, maintenance, health and safety – are all impressed with the effects of ScandMist on their atmosphere and it’s very low running costs.
