Dry ice cuts machine maintenance by 60%01 March 2010

By turning to cryogenic (dry ice) cleaning, fruit pre-packer Turners PPL reckons it has cut the time to strip down, clean, refurbish and reassemble its weighing and packing machines from five days to two - an amazing 60%.

Antony Taylor, head of operations at the Newmarket plant, states that the site supplies around 85% of Tesco's citrus fruit, pre-packing around 50 million units per year, but that it is not without its challenges. "Citrus fruit is a very messy product for machines," he points out. "In a matter of hours, the wax coating applied to fruit is deposited on parts of the machine and ancillary equipment. Similarly, sticky labels add to this problem."

So, with the machines running 24/7, getting cleaning and maintenance slick is clearly critical to operations - including in terms of food hygiene and safety. However, Taylor explains that, although, in an ideal world, machines would be taken out of service every six months for stripping down and cleaning, because of the waxing that approach would lead to "a huge number of operational and engineering issues ... due to increasing faults and general breakdowns".

Before finding the dry ice solution, he was using high-pressure washers - and incurring the downtime necessitated for disassembling the machines, removing parts to an external cleaning area, washing them, then moving the parts to the maintenance workshop before refurbishing and re-assembly. "This whole process took two engineers five days. Also, an unexpected breakdown on a second machine could result in a failure to meet the delivery schedule," says Taylor.

Then came Polar ICS, whose technology is based on cryogenic blasting, in which tiny dry ice pellets are accelerated in compressed air to strike surfaces at the speed of sound, embrittling coatings before vapourising and lifting them clear, without waste. Taylor recalls how the demonstration on one of his machines took just four hours, instead of two to three days, because all work was done in-situ, without stripping down or removal from the line.

"After being dry ice blasted, the machine parts and weighing systems looked brand new," he says. "The operator from Polar ICS cleaned all parts of the machine by switching to different shaped nozzles. I was so impressed that we are currently considering whether we can use Polar ICS to clean other non-machine assets, including cold storage racking, walls and ceilings."

And he adds: "We've now set up a revised maintenance and cleaning plan. Once a fortnight, a Polar ICS service engineer cleans two machines in situ, which takes one day. This means that our preventive maintenance on any one machine now takes just one to two days."

Brian Tinham

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