Six ways to get outof old Routines inyour Process

At ystral we name our machines “mixer” instead of agitator or stirrer since we want to point out the signifi -cant technical diff erence between mixing and moving media. Conventional agitators and stirrers create a horizontal rotation of the liquid. The inertia of the rotating mass hinders the vertical mass exchange. You can agitate for hours but the liquid is still not yet homogeneous. Our Jetstream Mixers use a consistent vertical mixing principle. This way everything is mixed completely homogeneous, typically in less than three minutes.

Of course, the key question is whether an old agitator should be replaced because it is already payed off since years and it will last another twenty years. This is the same story with lots of “proven” technologies in process enginee-ring. Conventional proven routines are often slow and ineffi cient. However, if the agitator is replaced with a Jetstream Mixer, it takes less than a tenth of the time, just one instead of ten process tanks and just a third of the energy. You need less space, less electrical control systems, less valves, pipes, operators and so on. If you want to speed up your process and save resources, you should carry on reading our proposals.

In case you have to blend diffi cult miscible materials homogenously, does it always need to be done inside a process tank? No, it is defi nitely much more effi cient to use an external mixer or disperser outside the vessel, a machine that does not need to move the entire contents of the tank while it intensi-vely mixes the diffi cult media. Any kind of dispersing or emulsifying machine integrated inside a vessel has too many obvious drawbacks. External machines outside the vessel generate considerable advantages when mixing for example powders into liquids, when mixing media with totally diff erent viscosities or densities or when creating dispersions of non-miscible materials like for exam-ple oil/water emulsions.

There are many other mixing applications as well: heating and cooling, ae-ration and deaeration, crystallisation, suspension and precipitation, saponi-fi cation, extraction and so on? Even there is considerable potential for more effi cient mixing equipment.

We analyse your existing processes and procedures, detect all the weak points and propose new solutions.

DR.-ING. HANS-JOACHIMJACOBSenior Expert Process and Applications

ystral is a think tank in process technology. Our engineers, technicians and product developers are analysing in what areas optimisations can be achieved by our machines and process systems. Our customers know and estimate ystral for decades as a competent and reliable partner in the fi eld of process engineering. Once a concept is developed, it often becomes a standard world-wide.

However, the criteria are very diff erent in highly developed industrial nations and in newly developing economies. And even the demands in the individual industrial branches, between wastewater and pharmaceuticals, diff er as well. We are active in all these areas and we adapt our solutions to all these diff e-rences.

Maximum productivity and minimum production costs are the most important goals of our customers. In order to achieve this, we have identifi ed the follo-wing six areas, where our technical process solutions are decisively important.

Process time

Energy, raw materials, resources

Product quality

Safety

Flexibility

Integration into existing plants

We would like to show how we generate strategic advantages with ourmachines, plants and, above all, with clever technical process concepts.

Use our expertise and competence.

Added value for your process

Each process takes its time – that almost sounds like a law. But you can circumvent this law completely. We have methods and machines that can reduce the current process time to below one per cent.

A process consists of process steps: fi lling, dosing, dissolving, mixing, heating, melting, emul-sifying, cooling, etc. Each step takes time. There are three ways to save process time:

Carry out several or even all process steps in parallel,

Radically shorten time-intensive steps through new and better technology

Consistently eliminate process steps by exploiting new physical eff ects.

Some examples:

In order to make ketchup, 200 tonnes of sugar have to be dissolved in a cold vinegar-water mix in one factory every day. This currently takes 6 to 7 hours per silo truck of sugar. To speed up the dissolution some engineers proposed to increase the temperature. This would be possible, in principle, but is a huge waste of energy and the total time including heating and cooling is longer. Inline sugar dissolving plants were also requested. The costs have been even higher. We were asked whether we could speed up the process by adding the sugar much faster using our Conti-TDS machines. We can do this and we would be grateful to sell such machines, but it does not solve the problem.

The actual reason for the long dissolving time is the conventional agitator technology in the large sugar dissolving tanks. We were able to demonstrate in small and medium size trials that, with the same temperatures and concentrations, sugar can be dissolved in exactly 900 se-conds when using an ystral Jetstream Mixer, whether in a beaker, a 1,000-litre vessel or a large 50 m³ tank, but always exactly in 900 seconds. Precondition is selecting the right mixer with the correct specifi c power per volume ratio. The use of the Jetstream Mixer technology was an enormous success. The neighbours are happy as well because the 24-hour background noise due to the unloading of lorries is now reduced to a few hours per day.

The dissolving process of PMMA chips (Polymethyl methacrylate, also known as acrylic glass or Plexiglas®) into its Monomer MMA is very diff erent. Normally, this takes several hours, but for a totally diff erent reason: as soon as PMMA gets in contact with solvent vapours, its surface becomes extremely sticky. It forms large, partially wet clumps, which tend to swim at the liquid surface and can only be dissolved extremely slow. By using the Conti-TDS, the powder is inducted directly into the liquid and in this way it does not get in contact with solvent va-pours. Additionally, the particles are separated by vacuum expansion and every single piece is completely surrounded by liquid at the moment the powder is added. The dissolving process is reduced to a few seconds. The resin dissolves completely already inside the pipe on the way to the vessel. The dissolving time in the vessel is minimised.

Process time

1

In conventional manufacturing of shaving creams, fatty acids were molten in special melting tanks, which is an extremely slow and energy-intensive process. The hot liquid wax was mixed into a hot water phase at the same temperature, then emulsifi ed and fi nally saponifi ed under slow agitation. Any air ingress lead to foam. The caustic addition into the vessel lead to local peaks in the pH-level, to uncontrolled gel formation and to specks, which had to be fi ltered out – all together a time-con-suming, problematic process that required lots of vessels.

By using the ystral Conti-TDS, all the steps have been combined in a single machine. The fatty acid chips are now inducted directly into hot water, melted immediately, simultaneously emulsifi ed much more intensively than before and then saponifi ed under controlled conditions. The process time shrinks to a twentieth. There are no specks anymore in the liquid. Numerous process vessels and process steps have been eliminated.

Exactly the same process can be used to make Ibuprofen pain relief gels as well, as the same prob-lems occur here. The process time can be reduced by some orders of magnitude.

Paint manufacturers use fi ne-particulate phyllosilicates as inorganic, rheological additives. They off er enormous advantages compared to usual organic thickeners but are diffi cult to disperse. The micro-scopically small and extremely thin silica sheets of the powder are held together fi rmly by embedded positively charged metal ions. Using the current technology (dissolvers, agitators, mills) the paint manufacturer is not able to separate the silica micro sheets suffi ciently. The desired rheological pro-perties are not reached during the process. However, there is uncontrolled in-can-thickening of the fi nished paint. A wood varnish manufacturer, therefore, added an interim storage step of a complete week to his production process in order to anticipate this in-can-thickening somehow before the varnish is fi lled.

An automotive coating manufacturer required more than 5 hours to disperse 5,000 litres of lacquer in a high-speed dissolver . Certainly, a questionable method for this powder, but nevertheless this technique is still state of the art. By using Conti-TDS with its vacuum expansion technology during dispersion, this process was shortened to below 30 minutes. Energy consumption is far below 10 %. Interim storage is never necessary with this method. Post thickening no longer occurs. The phyllosili-cates actually generate higher viscosity than before and their percentage can, therefore, be reduced.

The production of highly viscous toilet cleaner gels is problematic. The viscosity is several hundred-thousand mPas. Intensive stirring or dispersion in a process vessel after hydration destroys the gel irreversibly. We analysed the process and found that we need precisely two dispersion steps: an initial one for the complete powder wetting and dispersion and a second one after the completed hydration – anything else damages the gel structure and reduces its transparency.

The new process is as follows: When fi lling the large process vessel, the powder thickener and all the liquid components are added inline with a vacuum dispersion machine. A real process does not take place in the process vessel, only a simple agitator is installed for low speed circulation. Immediately after fi lling is fi nished, the product is pumped out again via the same machine and is dispersed for the second time for a subsequent smoothing of the structure. The time between fi lling and emptying is precisely zero.

There are hundreds of examples for intelligent process-engineering solutions that reduce the process time enormously.

Process time

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ENERGY :

Process time reduction is always accompanied with energy savings.New processes save in the average two-thirds of the energy.

Unfortunately saving energy often is confused with saving power – which is not the same. There are providers advertising agitators with a low power number (Ne-number). Such a low power requirement is always based on an almost turbulence-free laminar fl ow in the vessel. Without turbulence all the liquid can be moved with minimum electrical power and a small motor. But is this positive for mixing processes? If you add, for example, some red and blue paste to such an agitated vessel fi lled with white paint, red and blue stripes will still be visible even after an hour of stirring. That is not mixing! This is just moving liquid. To get homogeneity it takes ages.

To mix two or more media, you need turbulence. But not everywhere inside the vessel – that would be a huge waste of energy. Jetstream Mixers are ideal, since they combine a local tur-bulent micro-mixing zone inside the small mixing head with an almost turbulence-free laminar macro mixing movement in the rest of the vessel. Because of the local turbulence, Jetstream Mixers need more power, up to two times more than a simple agitator. But they need less than a tenth of the time until complete homogeneity. Energy is the product of power and time. The total energy requirement is less than a third despite the higher power.

When heating or cooling in a process vessel, a vertical liquid movement downwards or up-wards along the cooled or heated tank wall is mandatory. Agitators, that generate predomi-nantly horizontal rotation, don’t exchange the liquid at the wall fast enough. They achieve only limited heat transfer compared to vertically circulating Jetstream Mixers. Heating or cooling with Jetstream Mixers in the tank needs just a fraction of the time and thus less energy as well.

RAW MATERIALS :

Raw material costs can be reduced in many ways: supply chains, prices, standardisation etc. But these are not the subjects for our discussion here. This section is about genuine raw material sa-vings while simultaneously increasing the quality of the end product. Two examples of this.

With a proportion of almost 60% of all pigments, titanium dioxide is by far the most important pigment in the manufacturing of lacquers, paints and inks. Depending on the titanium dioxide content in a paint, up to 50% of the raw material costs could be generated by this raw material alone. In addition: the global market price per tonne has increased by around 50 percent over the last few years. Main target is to achieve the same quality of the paint, measurable in colour strength, chromaticity and opacity, but with less titanium dioxide. This is possible by using the Conti-TDS with its unique inline dispersion technology.

The eff ect of titanium dioxide is based on its extraordinarily high refractive index. Titanium dioxide particles are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Therefore they are scattering all the light waves up to a certain distance from their particle surface. This so-called infl uence sphere is consi-derably greater than the individual particle itself because of the larger light wavelength. This means that only a reduced number of particles, with spaces between them, is needed for a completely white and completely covering coating.

Energy, raw materials, resources

2

RAW MATERIALS :

Infl uence sphere and light scattering on titanium dioxide particles. Suffi cient distance doubles the scattering capacity.

The illustration shows that two particles with a distance that is larger than three times their diameters will double the light scattering. Smaller gaps are a disadvantage. Agglomerated particles have the least eff ect. The infl uence sphere of multiple agglomerated particles is only insignifi cantly greater than that of a single particle. Agglomerated particles reduce the colour strength and opacity. As a result, a signifi cant part of the used titanium dioxide has not any eff ect.

The problem is that titanium dioxide has a strong tendency to agglomerate. The process-re-levant goal, therefore, is to separate the particles consistently and then to stabilise them in the right distance to each other. This is done in the Conti-TDS through high shear dispersion in combination with vacuum expansion. At the same time, dispersing additives are dosed and stabilize the distances. In wall paints, an average of eight percent titanium dioxide could be sa-ved by keeping colour strength and opacity the same. In printing inks the concentration could be reduced even more. These are considerable raw material savings.

Another example aff ects thickeners and stabilisers in yoghurt and desserts. They are required for stabilisation, to generate a creamy mouth feeling and to prevent from whey segregation, the formation of a clear liquid on top of the yoghurt in the cup. However, most thickeners have a negative side eff ect: they mask the fl avour. Less thickener means a more intensive fl avour.

If these thickeners and stabilisers are mixed into the liquid base using agitators, injectors or blenders as commonly found in the food industry, clumps and agglomerates are initially for-med. These either have to be broken down through dispersion or just fi ltered out. Unfortunate-ly, dispersion irreversibly destroys the shear-sensitive, already hydrated gel. Filtering causes an uncontrolled loss of thickener. As a result, a considerably larger quantity of thickener has to be used in the recipe in order to achieve the desired texture.

By using the Conti-TDS, the thickeners are solubilised without forming agglomerates. Addi-tional dispersion is not required. The texture is not destroyed. On average, the proportion of thickener is reduced by around a third. This not only saves hundreds of thousands of Euros a year, the quality and customer acceptance of the end products are also higher.

2Energy, raw materials, resources

RESSOURCES :

The crucial resources in highly developed industrial nations are personnel and space. Person-nel costs are high, the spatial possibilities often limited.

For a project in Germany, a very specifi c fi lm coating had to be manufactured. The show stop-per for that project was: If more than 2.5 operators were required to operate the entire plant, the factory would close in Germany and the production would move to a country with lower labour costs. The coating was extremely quick-drying and cohesive, a challenging task. We were able to implement a highly eff ective plant so that only one operator was actually requi-red. Thus the production site was secured.

Today human labour is substituted more and more by automation. But in many areas of process industry, especially in powder handling or quality adjustment, not every step can be automated. Some require manual operations or interventions, others run completely auto-matically. Totally diff erent recipes have to be realised. We design plants where, for example, all the automatic processes run during the night shift while the processes requiring operator intervention are executed predominantly during the day.

The decisive disadvantage of many longer existing process plants is their limited productivity. Existing “proven” and established technologies are often rather slow. Especially mixing and agitation steps take far too long. The entire plant is blocked for hours . In order to increase ca-pacity based again on these established technologies, additional plants are needed, and soon the available space is used up.

And it is not only the space for the additional plant itself: The area required for buff ering raw materials, for collecting empty containers, the transport paths for forklifts, the space in the control centre and in the electrical control room is also mostly used up. Typically there is not enough compressed air available and the compressed air network is not designed for double capacity. This means an additional plant creates far more resource problems than just the additional space needed for the plant itself. Generally, it is more appropriate to dismantle an ineffi cient plant and replace it with faster technology instead of multiplying it.

But there is a third way with reduced investment and minimum changes as well: our powder wetting machines and mixers are often integrated into existing plants, in order to increase their capacity at minimum costs.

When making ice cream, the pre-mix is temporarily stored in aging tanks. Using Jetstream Mixers, the aging time can be reduced by about half. As a result, capacity can be doubled with the same number of aging tanks, without installing new tanks. In a specifi c case, twenty aging tanks were refi tted at the same time.

New technology requires considerably less space. In Germany in 2019, for example, 492,000 tonnes of interior wall paint have been manufactured (Deutsche Lack- und Druckfarbenindust-rie in Zahlen 2019, Verband der deutschen Lack- und Druckfarbenindustrie). Presumably more than one hundred dissolver plants were used to produce that amount.

A single Conti-TDS paint process unit can make around 95,000 to 100,000 tonnes of paint a year on just 10 x 10 metres foot print. Only 5 such plants would be needed to produce the total dispersion required.

2Energy, raw materials, resources

DIFFERENCES FROM TRADITIONAL METHODS

The powder is wetted completely at fi rst contact with the liquid under maximum turbulence and energy density.

In order to prevent agglomerate formation in the Conti-TDS, powder and liquid are fed into the wetting and dispersion zone via completely diff erent paths.

The liquid surface is increased enormously, it gets even larger than the powder surface.

The wetting takes place under vacuum expansion – this separates the powder particles and destroys solid powder agglomerates

High Shear dispersion takes place during wetting and not afterwards.This way air is not fi nely dispersed, like in other systems.

The centrifugal eff ect separates the air easily from the dispersion

Powders have very diff erent properties: they attract or reject the liquid, they swell, stick, mo-dify the rheology, are abrasive or shear-sensitive, or even react with the liquid. The Conti-TDS can be adjusted easily to each specifi c condition and can also be fi tted with multiple tools and powder inlets.

CONTI-TDS

Production with consistent and maximum quality should be a matter of course, but this is not always the case. The main problems are:

Insuffi cient technology

Excessive variance in the processes

Insuffi cient cleanability and cross-contamination

With its technologies, ystral off ers solutions that prevent precisely these problems.

Due to the vertical circulation of the entire contents of the vessel, Jetstream Mixers not only provide a faster, but also a signifi cantly more homogeneous mixture. The results are remar-kable, for example, in car manufacturing. Paint spraying robots are sensitive to minimum dif-ferences in viscosity, composition and consistency of the sprayed paint. Deviations will cause visible failures. The paint quality must remain consistent from begin when the storage tank is full to the end when it is empty. Jetstream Mixers are used in these vessels for homogeneous mixing at every fi lling level.

Suspensions contain solid particles, which are heavier than the liquid and therefore they tend to sediment to the bottom of the tank. The Jetstream Mixer principle is ideal to prevent from sedimentation. Everything that even only has a tendency to sink down to the bottom is imme-diately fully mixed again.

Process plant with Big-Bag station

Product quality

3

Jetstream Mixer

DIFFERENCES OF JETSTREAM MIXERS COMPARED TO CONVENTIONAL AGITATORS:

Completely homogeneous vertical mixing of the vessel

No rotation of the liquid

No vortex, no air ingress

Actual “complete suspension”

Micro-mixing with high turbulence directly in the mixing head,intensive,turbulent, high energy density concentrated in that small zone

At the same time, macro-mixing of the entire contents of the vessel,homogeneous,laminar, effi cient

No layers with diff erent concentrations

No sedimentation of particles on the bottom of the vessel

No exposed, rotating parts

No baffl es required

Can be used for every fi lling level, tank design and shape

Quality diff erences from batch to batch have two causes:

Variations by the operator

Fluctuations in the raw material qualityHere we ignore fl uctuations due to insuffi cient dosing accuracy, because these can be overcome by improving or adjusting the dosing methods.

Quality fl uctuations are huge when powders are added manually into liquids. The operator has an enormous infl uence. He adds the powder either fast or slow, steady or bag after bag, from high above or directly on the surface, with or without false air and at the wrong or the right place on the liquid surface. Agglomerates and fl oating layers of unwetted powder are typical issues. But not only the manual addition is problematic. Conventional methods like feeding from top, induction with vacuum from below or using conventional blenders or injectors in a loop have all the same problem: the powder surface to be wetted is more than a thousand times larger than the liquid surface avai-lable for wetting. This imbalance is the actual cause of clumps, agglomerates, and ultimately quality fl uctuations.

To pull powder from the surface into a liquid, the agitator has to be accelerated so fast, that a vortex is created, which pulls an uncontrolled amount of additional air into the liquid as well. Air creates foam reduces the mixing and minimises the dispersion eff ect. Agglomerates have to be broken down through long dispersing times. This damages the product and heats it unnecessarily.

Serios problems are obvious in the production of lacquers, paints and inks in a dissolver. The mea-sured quality is simply not constant. Each batch is diff erent and varies in terms of viscosity, colour strength and particle size distribution. After each batch, the quality has to be checked, adjusted and checked again until the product can fi nally be released for further processing – an expensive process.

If you want to tackle the causes of quality fl uctuations from the ground up, fi rstly the speed of powder addition has to be controlled independently of the operator, and secondly, the liquid surface availa-ble for wetting has to be increased extremely.

Precisely these two measures are performed when using the Conti-TDS. The operator has no infl u-ence on the induction speed. The machine determines the suction power. The powder wetting takes place with maximum turbulence precisely in the high-shear dispersion zone where the liquid surface is increased by more than ten thousand times.

The product quality is consistent and reproducible. Adjustments are not necessary. The costs for quality checks are considerably reduced. Overall, the manufacturing process for lacquers, paints and inks has been completely revolutionised by the use of the Conti-TDS technology.

Powders are dispersed agglomerate-free in the liquid by the Conti-TDS

3Product quality

ystral manufactures machines and plants with highest standards of hygienic design for the food production and pharmaceuticals industries. They are easy to clean without dismantling (cleaning in place – cip) and can be drained completely. In the production of fl avours and fragrances, for example, there must not be any noticeable cross contamination when chan-ging products. When changing from onion fl avour to vanilla, for example, this would be tasted immediately. The same hygienic design is also used for plants in the chemicals industry or in paint and pigment paste production.

In the plant shown on the photograph, high-concentrated colorants are made batch after batch, one after the other, in any colour you like: white, red, yellow, black green etc. Cleaning takes place automatically when changing colours between the individual batches.

The pipe connections are not the simple fl anges usually found in chemical industry. These are aseptic connections, easy to clean, gap free fl anges in hygienic design, as used in the food or pharmaceuticals industries. The surface quality of the product-facing metal surfaces is polis-hed. Instead of sharp corners and edges, all the transitions are designed with curves that cor-respond to the principles of hygienic design. Retractable spray heads are used in the vessel. In this way, the user in the paint industry profi ts from our range of experience in completely diff erent industries. Colour changes are possible quickly and easily.

Plant for manufacturing pigment pastes according to the principles of hygienic design

3Product quality

Dust is harmful to health. The admissible limit values for individual powders or liquids are stated in the respective safety data sheets. When fi lling powders from above into a vessel, this dust always occurs in combination with humidity or solvent vapours released during agitation. Thickening agents, polymers, or even simple dust from food products in combination with humidity form very sticky and diffi cult-to-clean layers, everywhere. Spectacle wearers know that problem very well! The same layers are created inside the respiratory tract and the lungs. Dust from resins dissolves in solvent vapours and form adhesive resin layers. Silica or clays and vapour form solid coatings – in the pulmonary alveoli. The combination of vapours and dust is often very irritating, sensitising and generally critical.

Another safety aspect is the explosion risk. Most processed powders are organic or organi-cally coated, and thus they are combustible. This causes the risk of a dust explosion. Even if a powder is inert, i.e. it is not combustible itself, but is processed in the presence of infl ammable gases and vapours, there is a risk of an explosion, in this case, a gas explosion.

The highest risk is the combination of combustible dust with infl ammable gases or vapours since the limit values in the safety datasheets of the respective individual components no lon-ger apply and critical fi gures, such as the lower explosion limit or the minimum ignition energy, are signifi cantly reduced.

The decisive measure for avoiding all these health and explosion risks is to use a Conti-TDS for dust-free induction directly into the liquid.

In this way neither dust nor mixtures with humidity or solvent vapours are created. The powders can be added into the process vessel even without opening it. This is particularly interesting for aseptic or clean room processes as well. The ingress of contaminated ambient air into the vessel has to be prevented with sterile fi lters. Using Conti-TDS for powder addition the internal classi-fi cation inside a tank can be higher than the room classifi cation outside the tank. A lower room classifi cation safes millions.

Safety

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Conti-TDS for dust-free induction of powder directly into the liquid

A key property of our machines and plants is their fl exibility. Users have to react to customer demands and changes in the market. Batch sizes, formulations and even the processes them-selves must be variable.

Processes, raw materials and fi nal products may change. New raw materials or additives are used. Older shear resistant additives are replaced by new ones, may be very shear sensitive now. Or the opposite: the new ingredients have to be treated signifi cantly more intensive. Very often the initiative comes from the purchasing department because it has succeeded in getting much cheaper raw material, unfortunately often with a coarser grain or stronger agglomera-ted. Now it has to be dispersed much harder. Ultimately, the fi nal customer asks to get impro-ved qualities. Quality demands are constantly increasing.

No reason to refi t the plants for every additional task or to change the machines every time. Subsequent modifi cation mean engineering costs and production stops during refi tting. New pipes, cables and instrumentations would have to be installed, new safety inspections and certifi cates are required. Extensions to the existing controls are necessary. The follow-up costs are very high.

Forward-thinking planning, convertibility, fl exibility and future orientation are, therefore, important aspects when planning and deciding investments. ystral is setting trends especially for those requirements with easily convertible multi-purpose machines, multi-functional inline machines and fl exible plants.

Industrial Jetstream Mixers and dispersers of our LDT series are real multi-purpose machines. Smaller machines up to 7,5 kW, which are typically operated on a lift, are equipped with com-pletely interchangeable shafts. Depending on the task, the interchangeable shafts can be fi tted with more than ten diff erent tools. Changing the shaft takes just seconds.

Bigger LDT machines inside a tank are also designed for a simple exchange of the tools.Jetstream Mixer tools are used for the complete, homogeneous mixing and suspending. They generate a vertical circulation without rotation of the liquid, without any baffl es inside the tank. For intensive dispersion, on the other hand, dispersion heads are used. They operate accor-ding to the rotor-stator principle and reduce particle or drop sizes in suspensions or emulsi-ons. The Dispermix and the High Shear Dispermix are combinations of disperser and mixer. In addition, there is an interchangeable shaft with a TDS induction mixer for the induction of powders into liquid as well.

The interchangeable shafts for the machines on a lift are designed such that the mixer shaft is enclosed in a permanent steel pipe. There is no risk of an accident when touching this shaft, unlike to agitators or dissolvers with open rotating shafts.

Flexibility

5

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Multipurpose machine with interchangeable shafts on a lifting frame for batch sizes up to 2,000 litres

Multipurpose machine inside a vessel with exchangeable mixing head, here as Jetstream Mixer

Flexibility

Inline machines installed outside the tank, either in line or in a pipe loop, must be as fl exible as possible, multi-functional and easy to refi t as well. Powder wetting machines of type Conti-TDS have the primary task of inducting powder dust-free into the liquid and dispersing it at the same time. For applications without powder induction there are tools available that allow the powder wetting machine to be converted in just a few moments into a high shear disper-sion machine with shear gradients of up to 100,000 s-1. The conversion is very easy: only two screws have to be removed and two components replaced.

For big globally acting companies ystral off ers a special concept. These companies guarantee identical product qualities around the world, even if batch sizes, technical requirements and locally applicable standards may vary. To achieve this, identical machines are required globally. These machines must have maximum fl exibility so that they can be adjusted to local conditi-ons and future tasks with minimum changes.

We have developed basic machines, which can be operated globally in all electricity networks and under all applicable standards. The machine execution is tailored to the largest possible product range. However, as it is never possible to manufacture diff erent product groups with just one single machine, there are sets of tool kits to adopt it quick and easily. These tool kits consist of three to four parts only. The machines are interchangeable globally between the lo-cations. The spare parts are also identical. This fl exible modular concept has proved success-fully.

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Rotor and stator for refi tting the Conti-TDS into a high shear dispersion machine with shear speeds of up to 50 m/s

Flexibility

Not only machines, even complete systems require maximum fl exibility. A wood coating manu-facturer, for example, produced more than 400 formulas in a wide range of qualities and batch sizes on customers demand in two factories. More than 20 dissolvers in diff erent sizes are used, hundreds of transportable tanks. The labour costs are high. The entire production can be realised in just two Conti-TDS double tank plants. One Conti-TDS is installed between two vessels and works automatically. The liquid feed, the powder feed and the controls are only needed once for both systems.

The special feature of these double tank plants is that both process vessels can be comple-tely diff erent sizes. As a result, batch sizes from 100 to 3,000 litres can be produced in each system; an extremely wide spectrum. The cleaning is fully automatic. The two plants cover the complete bandwidth of recipes and batch sizes, transparent, white and coloured. None of the previously used dissolvers is needed any longer.

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Globally used Conti-TDS comprising the basic machine and an installed tool kit for manufacturing dairy desserts

Flexibility

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Flexible double tank plant based on Conti-TDS for producing batch sizes of 100 to 3,000 litres

Flexibility

Existing process plants often get to their performance limits after a couple of years. They no longer reach the required quality or satisfy the current safety requirements.

In such a case it is not always necessary to replace the entire plant. By using new mixing tech-nology directly in the process tank or through external machines, which are simply connected outside in a loop, existing plants can be upgraded and operated safely with increased effi ciency.

All ystral machines can be retrofi tted into existing plants this way. The examples of replacing agitators with Jetstream Mixers in ketchup production or in aging tanks for ice cream produc-tion have been mentioned already. In these cases, an enormous reduction in process time was achieved.

If the vessel geometry is appropriate, the existing agitator is simply replaced with a Jetstream Mixer. However, if this is not possible since the position or fl ange size is not suitable, the Jet-stream Mixer is supplied with a new welding fl ange, which could be designed for the top, the side or the bottom of the tank. In this way, the mixer can be fi tted in the optimum position and guarantees a completely homogeneous mixing in the shortest time.

Instead of a simple Jetstream Mixer, multi-purpose machines can be used instead – machines, in which the Jetstream Mixer can be replaced very easily with a Dispermix, High Shear Disper-mix or disperser. Consequently, the user has the option of adjusting the machine easily for future changes to the process. In this way, it is possible to mix, disperse or emulsify as required.

Such retrofi tted machines can also be supplemented easily as an additional mixer – if the current agitator allows this. The existing agitator is not removed. The welding fl ange is arranged such that the new mixer and the existing agitator support each other rather than interfere with each other.

Integrating external machines outside a vessel into existing plants is signifi cantly easier. Just pipes and valves are required. Through integration of an inline dispersion machine in a loop with an existing plant manufacturing fl avours and fragrances, the high-pressure homogenisation was not required anymore for 90 per cent of products made there. This increased the capacity of the entire plant by several factors.

Integration into existing plants

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Inline dispersion machine for integrating into existing process plants

In a modern factory used to manufacture plant-based creams and spreads, savings in the millions were achieved through the integration of a single Conti-TDS. Even if the complete factory was quite new, a more than 60 years old mixing technology was used to add powders and vegetable oil. Since these ingredients cannot simply be added to the large mixing tanks, a small square process vessel with a bottom entry agitator/disperser was installed in a loop with the main tank. Powders and oil were added into the vortex of this tank. The droplet size distri-bution of the emulsion achieved was 20 to 30µm and the process time for a complete proce-dure was two hours. By integrating a Conti-TDS instead of this mixing system, the process was less than 30 minutes and the droplet size was reduced to below 2 µm, which also meant an enormous reduction in the high-pressure homogenisation, if required at all.

Conti-TDS machines are often integrated subsequently because the addition of powders from above into a vessel is no longer permitted. The reasons for this are dust, hygienic problems and the risk of an explosion when adding powders from above. In this case, the Conti-TDS is integrated so that the powders can be added dust-free and safely, not only into the existing plant but directly into the liquid product.

6Integration into existing plants

We are certain to fi nd together with you many undiscovered reserves in your processes, and we off er 45 years of experience in order to identify and use this potential. The optimum solu-tion for the respective problem is what drives us.

As a specialist machine and plant manufacturer with our own test centre, we serve the chemi-cals, food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals industries, among others. Our solutions are used wherever powders or liquids are to be mixed or dispersed in other liquids. A whole series of proven plant and machine types are available, which are customised with maximum process relevance to the individual needs of customers. So that they are integrated into the respective production chain seamlessly and fl exibly.

Individual machines and process plants are the core competence of ystral. Each plant is diff e-rent and so is every solution. ystral combines machines and components to create a plant that is precisely tailored to your needs. This variability requires a very experienced development team every time. But this is also an incentive because your processes are value-added!

If you have been able to fi nd optimisation potential for your product, we will be happy to look at your process. Get in touch today.

This is the way to the right advisor:

+49 7634 5603 0 ystral@ystral.com

About ystral

Individual process plants based on the Conti-TDS

ystral gmbh maschinenbau + processtechnikWettelbrunner Straße 7 · 79282 Ballrechten-Dottingenystral@ystral.com · +49 7634 5603-0 · ystral.com

DR.-ING. HANS-JOACHIM JACOB