TLDR: Texas Tissue replaced an ineffective, noisy overhead fan system with SonicAire, eliminating the need for plant shutdowns and third-party cleaning crews. The facility now prevents product contamination from falling dust, reduces combustible dust hazards, and maintains better air quality without the safety risks and opportunity costs of manual cleaning.
Key Points:
• Previous fans were noisy, weak, and left dust in hiding spots
• Eliminated need for scissor lift shutdowns and third-party cleaning
• Prevented product contamination and rework costs
• Reduced combustible dust fire hazards
• Improved air quality and safety conditions
Transcript:
I’m Angelo DeGemmis, and I’m Technical Director of Texas Tissue. We are a tissue paper converting facility. One of our biggest challenges here is dust. By working on paper tissue, we have dust, and create dust that collects all over the place. Our biggest challenge was to keep our environment safe.
In the beginning, we were trying to manage this dust problem with some other kind of overhead fan that was very noisy; was not giving me the correct flow; was not powerful; and was always leaving dust in many hiding spots around the machines. And it complicated our lives on keeping our environment safe. Because, you know, this kind of flammable dust can cause problems all over the place. And just a little spark can cause a big problem.
From the previous fan system, or lack of fan system, I noticed that there was a lot of stuff falling down, trickling on to the product. We had to rework it or clean it off and throw it away. If we wanted to release some of the debris, we had to bring a scissor lift in, shut down the plant for a day or so – blow down, wait a day, come back, clean it. So, you have to pay for labor, you have to pay for opportunity costs associated with that downtime, all the staffing…
One of the main issues regarding quality is the fact that there’s a lot of dust accumulation in hard-to-reach areas. Now, with the fans, we’re able to continuously mitigate the dust accumulation. And, because of their performance, we no longer have to hire a third party to come with a scissor lift, creating safety hazards to blow down the plant.
Before, we had: dust falls on to the product; it’s now contaminated, and we can no longer ship it out. So, on the backside we’re also saving money.
From an air quality standpoint, it’s much better. We have a lot less paper debris sitting on top that filters in. A lot less accumulation – this is also a safety hazard as well, because those dust particles are also flammable, combustible – so, this has helped safety and also prevent further downtime from cleanliness.
We could use more fans, obviously, because we’ve seen that they work very well. So other parts of our facility would be improved if we had more fans in the facility.
