Manufacturing businesses are often looking for ways to minimise their waste in terms of spoilage or rejection by upgrading to newest state of the art machinery. However, manufacturers could be thinking beyond their actual products and the items used on-site, to re-evaluate if they could be reusing manufacturing equipment and infrastructure. In doing so they could not only reduce the need for new installations but also make significant financial savings.
Reusing existing isolated foundations for new machinery in a beverage can plant
Isolated foundations and other vibration control solutions are frequently used in factories and manufacturing plants to reduce levels of transmitted vibrations that affect the health and safety of workers as well as the accuracy and productivity of surrounding machinery and activity. This is especially true in beverage can manufacturing plants where heavy impact machinery such as cupper presses and bodymakers can generate excessive dynamic loads.
A recent project for Farrat in Cairo, Egypt, was to establish whether a pre-existing isolated foundation could be used for new manufacturing equipment. A member of our Industrial Vibration Isolation team made a visit to the factory to assess the level of performance of some existing isolated foundations that are currently supporting bodymakers.
These results have been used to determine if a spare isolated foundation installed 10 years ago and presenting the same design could be used to support new machine in the near future.
Not only would this enable a significant financial saving but would also negate the need for digging out new isolated foundations and the associated materials and disruption. In addition, repurposing something already in place is a more environmentally friendly option for a business that creates a product that can be recycled an infinite number of times.
Engineering led vibration and noise measuring and analysis
To determine whether existing infrastructure could be used for effective vibration control, contact the Farrat vibration and noise consultancy team, who work with a wide range of clients across the manufacturing sector, using on-site portable instrumentation for vibration measurement and vibration analysis around the world.
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