Your plant is running at full capacity, but your customers want more. Building a bigger plant is the obvious long-term solution, but you need to resolve this sooner. What can you do in the short term?
The maths says that you can achieve six batches per 24 hour day if you can make and transfer a batch in four hours, running the plant on a 24 hour triple shift.
In 1991, we built a calcium grease plant, based round a three Tonne pressure kettle that could get fairly close 18 Tonnes per day output. How was this possible?
- 130°C maximum batch temperature – Unlike Lithium or Polyurea grease, Calcium grease batches do not need to be heated into the 200°C region. Until recently, people have avoided Calcium grease because of its low dropping point, but new additives can boost its dropping point to near-Lithium levels. Furthermore, moving from Lithium to Calcium gets you away from the present Lithium supply shortages and pricing volatility
- A heat exchanger in the batch circulation line. This can effectively double the the heating and cooling rate of the batch. In the pictured plant, we used a shell and tube heat exchanger, because the grease’s low dropping point, melted out stagnant buildup during each batch. Nowadays, we would use a Scraped Surface Heat Exchanger to ensure no buildup on the heat transfer surfaces and to increase the heating and cooling rate.
- A heat exchanger that recycled waste heat during the cooling phase into the next batch’s base oil. This has the dual benefit of carbon footprint reduction and giving the next batch a head-start through base oil that was already warm.
Of course, you don’t have to implement all three; even one or two of the above has the potential to make a noticeable difference. Furthermore, there are additional techniques involving triple action agitation, alternative heating and agitation that we can add to speed up the process.
If you want to manufacture faster, as soon as possible, before going bigger in the long-term, please contact us and we will provide a suitable package.