Fast paced lifestyles and eating on the go has created a rocketing demand for portable, single serving food and beverage offerings. Along with the food must come the packaging in the form of cups, bowls, tubs with lids and various other containers and resealable bottles. Industrial manufacturer Logoplaste, operating 67 factories and 450 machines in 17 countries, has created some of the most recognizable containers for beverages, condiments, personal care and household products for over 40 years.
Logoplaste excels at meeting challenges such as speed to market, product differentiation, cost efficiency and sustainability. Their Kansas City Missouri plant, opened in 2013, houses up-to-date technologies and uses stream-lined processes in injection molding, stretch-blow molding and extrusion molding. Their molding production processes include high heat chambers and hot sidewalls to melt plastic raw materials, followed by extrusion into cooling molds that create the finished containers. Knowing the critical demands needed to keep the facility operating at peak efficiency, the plant’s HVAC packaged system uses 130 Ton Trane chiller units which are designed and engineered to meet the most demanding cooling schedules for this high capacity plastics manufacturer.
Cottonwood Trees in Abundance
Environmental elements are a challenge for any outdoor cooling system. This facility is surrounded by a river and dense woods on one side, and a major highway and heavy industrial on the other sides. Cottonwood trees are abundant in the woods. Their white fluffy seeds fly through the air, and head right for the Trane unit’s outside air cooled condenser coils that have aluminum fins mechanically bonded to seamless copper tubing. Seeds, as well as airborne highway and industrial dirt are continually drawn into the chiller air intakes, clogging critical air flow. Brett Wagner, facility maintenance supervisor for Logoplaste, found that the dirty chiller units took 4 hours to clean each time, and resulted in costly manpower and system downtime. Sonja Hyder, their local air filtration expert with RamAir, recommended PreVent® air intake screens as a fast and convenient solution.
Bonus Savings – Secure without Screws
PreVent® air intake screens are custom sized and made of black polypropylene media, finished with vinyl edging and grommets for easy installation on all equipment types. Installation has been made even easier and faster with Permatron’s recent introduction of MagnaMount®. A neodymium magnetic mounting option that eliminates the need to drill into equipment, this plastic mount clip with a powerfully strong earth magnet sticks to the surface of metal enclosure cabinets, allowing them to be repositioned as needed. The quick mount reduces installation time to minutes and requires no tools. RamAir’s service team initially estimated the PreVent screen installation at 6 hours with standard mount clips with screws. Using MagnaMount allowed RamAir to complete the installation in under 1 hour. The UV protected PreVent screens are reusable and quickly brushed clean with a rubber broom supplied by Permatron. According to Wagner, the PreVent screens have been a huge timesaver in keeping the Trane air intakes protected against airborne environmental debris, allowing the systems to run clean and efficiently. Keeping the fins and coils clean now takes 15 minutes. Logoplaste continues to produce convenient packaging solutions distinct to the market, while PreVent air intake screens and the convenience of the new MagnaMount installation option helps to maintain their facility efficiencies.
