Eccentric Disc Pumps The Bottom-Line Benefits of Product Recovery

The fulcrum in optimizing product yield is the pump that is used to transfer and recover raw materials or finished products through the suction and discharge lines. Learn how eccentric disc pumps feature product-recovery capabilities that significantly reduce waste from hygienic food and beverage, pharmaceutical and cosmetic manufacturing while increasing ROI.

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Product waste is one of the areas in hygienic manufacturing where extremely high costs are being incurred. The Mc Kinsey Quarterly Food Waste Alliance has reported that more than $ 120 billion of product goes to waste worldwide annually. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) also estimates that the United States is losing 40 % of its food from farm to fork to landfills. Between farm and fork are the processing plants that manufacture some of these products, which is the area of focus for this article.

The term “product recovery” can relate to a number of different operations in hygienic manufacturing, but for the purposes of this discussion, we will focus on product recovery as it pertains to either raw ingredients or intermediate/finished products that may remain in the suction or discharge fluid-transfer lines at the conclusion of production runs or between product changeovers. There are many critical areas within a hygienic-manufacturing operation where fluid transfer is required. However, many manufacturers are simply flushing these expensive materials down the drain when they do not optimize their product-recovery capabilities, which can be accomplished through the use of eccentric disc pump technology.

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Incorporating increased energy efficiency into the hygienic-manufacturing process is one way to save operating costs, but is it the best?

The Challenge

Incorporating increased energy efficiency into the hygienic-manufacturing process is one way to save operating costs, but is it the best? Chart 1 (see picture gallery) shows just how much money is consumed and potentially saved, per positive displacement pump, if the cost for energy is $0.10 per kilowatt hour (KwH):

The sum of $1,008 is the energy cost to run the pump annually. Suppose we were able to reduce the energy consumption by a large factor of 20%, which is admittedly unlikely. That would represent a saving of almost $202 per pump per year. For comparison’s sake, however, chart 2 shows a very conservative example of how much can be saved when using positive displacement eccentric disc pump technology with a minimum product-recovery capability of 70% to transfer a finished product from a feed tank to a filler:

When you take the product-recovery savings of $32,160 and divide it by the power savings of $202 the product-recovery savings is 160 times higher per pump! Another way to view it is that the product-recovery savings accumulated in one year in this example will pay for 32 years of energy to operate the pump (not even including interest on the money). As previously mentioned, this is a huge opportunity for the manufacturer, because within today’s pumping technologies there is very little room to improve motor efficiency (certainly not 20%, as in our example). However, there is significant room to improve product recovery.

This savings is only the most obvious, though. Please continue reading …

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