Pump up the protection!
Hand Sanitizer manufacturer leans on Climate Rental Services to pour on production during COVID 19.
These are unique times, for sure. A once-in-a-century pandemic isn’t something you can plan for and, of course, we all hope to put this year in the rearview mirror sooner rather than later. For one manufacturer of hand sanitizer, investing in new machine cooling infrastructure wasn’t a feasible option, but they needed to figure out a way to increase the capacity of the injection molding equipment to produce the plastic bottles their product was packaged in.
While they were able to commission a new injection molding machine, there were other problems in the supply chain. Injection molding machines require chilled water to help turn the plastic from a liquid to a solid state, and there was no way to could add additional chilled water capacity to their operation in time to meet the start date for the new injection molding equipment.
Temperature Control Rental Services was brought in to help bridge the gap between their current state and the time it would take to build and install a more permanent chiller plant. Our engineers were faced with a couple of challenges:
They needed to achieve two target temps with their chilled water to cool different parts of the injection mold process—those temps were almost 30 degrees different from each other.
They wanted to have a single, simple-to-operate system to deliver chilled water to the injection molding machine.
So, how do achieve different water temps from a single chiller in the volumes needed to cool their processes? Our solution was to build two loops of cold water from a single 100-ton, rental-ready chiller and ran them through a plate and frame heat exchanger to give them two different temperature flows. The plate and frame heat exchanger also solved the “make it simple” and “small footprint” challenges we were faced with.
In all, this was the perfect temporary solution to drive greater productivity to meet the demand for hand sanitizer production during COVID 19. With any luck, we won’t need to help this customer solve a problem like this again for another 100 years.