Cleaning can be fun when you have spare time and a good playlist. In a material processing environment, you might need to pause production several times a day to keep things clean. That’s not so fun.
In industries like food, pet food, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics, strict regulations and quality standards make it necessary to keep your equipment squeaky-clean. Rotary airlock valves with quick-cleaning features excel in those scenarios, because you can finish cleaning in minutes instead of hours.
At ACS Valves, we often recommend our Quick-Clean Series rotary valves for other industries as well, including construction and plastics. That’s because Quick-Cleans can be customized to reduce downtime in a wide range of applications.
The Quick-Clean entry system
All valves need to be disassembled periodically for maintenance. With a traditional valve, that can be a time-consuming process as you use tools to loosen bolts and remove the endplates. For larger and heavier valves, this can get even more difficult.
When you use a quick-cleaning model like the Quick-Clean Series, the system is built on rails. All you need to do is insert a set of provided T-handles and turn them until the endplate slides out of the housing. Then you can clean, wipe down, lubricate the internal components, and slide everything back in.
The whole process takes just a few minutes and doesn’t require any tools. Easy peasy.
A note on T-handles
We recently made a change to our Quick-Clean Series valves: we’ve phased out the toggle clamp entry system in favour of the T-handle system. Assembly and disassembly with T-handles is just as quick and easy, and this update lets us keep delivering high-quality valves in a timely manner.
An all-around time saver
Even if sanitation is not a major concern in your industry, you can still save a lot of time by using a quick-cleaning rotary valve. All rotary valves will need to be opened on a regular basis for tasks like maintenance, inspection, and troubleshooting.
Some processors also use quick-cleaning valves when they need the flexibility to swap between different materials. For example, if you convey multiple types of powders with similar characteristics, you can configure a Quick-Clean to handle all of them and simply clean, swap, and keep production rolling.
Using Quick-Cleans in other applications
It’s common to apply coatings to quick-cleaning rotary valves to help with cleaning, material flow, and sanitation. To customize a valve for your application, you can choose coatings that give the valve more resistance to corrosion and abrasion, for instance, or ones that help material flow more smoothly.
You can also swap out the rotor. Food-grade applications might have rotors with U-shaped vanes to prevent material from packing in the grooves, but in other applications, you could choose a rotor with helical grooves or staggered pockets to provide more uniform flow for specific materials. If you convey plastic pellets, regrind, or flakes, you can prevent jams by using a rotor with adjustable tips.
Accessories are another way to customize for your application. For example, shear protectors are helpful in the plastics industry because they prevent pellets and flakes from shearing or jamming in the rotor clearances. Air purge kits are another great add-on for multiple industries. They send compressed air to the shaft seals, rotor pockets, or both to prevent jamming in those areas.
Will a Quick-Clean work for you?
To find out if a quick-cleaning rotary airlock is really the best recommendation for your system, speak with a valve expert today. We’ll walk you through the best customization options for maximum performance, uptime, and flexibility in your application.
