Case: Liquid separator for food processing
This case concerns a separator used in the food processing equipment industry.
Like centrifugal juicers, the separator separates hard constituents of the food from liquid constituents. The separator consist of 2 parts: a sludge collector and a deep-drawn housing. As the item is an equipment used for food processing it is made from stainless steel.
How we manufacture the liquid seperator
Previously the customer manufactured the separator through a pressure turning operation, but we replaced this process with a deep-drawing solution. By replacing pressure turning with deep-drawing the production of the sludge collector became much faster. Additionally deep-drawing provides a better manufacturing precision on the finished product. In that way the finished product both become cheaper to manufacture and better in quality.
In the previous pressure turning operation, a 4 mm stainless steel sheet was formed over a diameter of 1,2 meter, resulting in a 1 mm material thickness after the process. This caused severe tensions in the material, and required several annealing processes, to be equalized again.
By shifting to a deep-drawing process the need for annealing processes are completely eliminated. Annealing processes of such large parts as this, is expensive and therefore the shift to our deep-drawing solution resulted in significant savings to the benefit of the customer.
