In an extremely competitive industry, Neville Chemical found that modernizing their resin filtration system could enable significant productivity gains, reduce waste, and eliminate a laborious task that was risky to workers' health.
When Neville Chemical Company opened its Anaheim, California plant in 1958, its major competitors in the burgeoning hydrocarbon resin industry were domestic giants such as Eastman and Exxon. Neville Chemical makes a variety of hydrocarbon resins for applications such as printing inks, adhesives and various coatings. Today, with a strong lineup of Asian competitors, the market has become much more competitive, particularly for smaller, family-owned manufacturers like Neville Chemical.
"With all of the competitive forces out there, productivity and safety are essential to our survival," says Rob Lonergan, general manager of Neville Chemical's Anaheim plant. "Of course, given cost and labor issues plaguing the California manufacturing environment today, those challenges have become even more critical here."
A recognized leader in synthetic hydrocarbon resins and coumarone-indene resins, Neville Chemical determined that updating its resin filtration system with a state-of-the-art system on the finished goods line would improve productivity and reduce waste.
"The call to upgrade our filtration on the solid resin line was beneficial in several ways," Lonergan says. "It not only enabled us to operate leaner through improved productivity and reduced waste, but also led us to vastly reduce the health and safety hazards that were present with our old system."
Neville Chemical, which established its Corporate Headquarters and main manufacturing facility near Pittsburgh in 1925, has used a variety of different systems for filtration of impurities from its finished resin products for many years. While filter bags performed well in removing impurities from resin, the use of filter bags was costly, required continual changing that interrupted production, was a difficult task for workers, and was also potentially hazardous.
All of those problems were completely eliminated when Neville Chemical replaced that bag filter system with a state-of-the-art self-cleaning Eco Filter system from Russell Finex.
Neville Chemical's bag filters in question were located on the molten resin line, where the resin material is heated to 400-500 degrees Fahrenheit in order to permit flow. After being filtered, the resin goes through a flaking process and becomes solidified and then packaged.
The combination of the heat of the resin and build-up of contaminants causes filtration bags to load up and decompose to the point that they have to be changed at regular intervals. "Unfortunately, those intervals require stopping resin product flow before a batch is complete," Lonergan explains.
Manufactured at the Russell Finex plant, the Eco filter is a self-cleaning system that integrates directly into the pipeline and completely eliminates the need to change filtration bags. By means of a unique spiral wiper design, the filter element is kept continuously clean, which ensures optimum efficiency of filtration. Because of its self-cleaning design, cleaning of the filter between batch runs is quick and easy with minimal disruptions during production changeovers.
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Resin Manufacturer Modernizes Process with New Russell Filtration System