Pneumatic Conveying system solves solids handling & dusting problems at a major Paint Manufacturing Unit, A CASE STUDY.

Company duplicates Pneumatic Conveying success at Ankleshwar & Patancheru Plant, India.  Hence, we carried the case study jointly.Asian paints Industries Ltd., Mumbai manufacturers and markets decorative paints and industrial paints.  In fact, the company is a market leader in decorative paints both distemper as well as emulsion paints.  The company has a market share of over 65% of the decorative paints in India. Asian Paints has its largest manufacturing facility at Ankleshwar, Gujarat.  Asian Paints also has factories at Patancheru, Kasna, and Cuddalore, Sri Lanka.

Batch Operations
Manufacturing distemper as well as emulsion paints requires batching, solids conveying &mixing as many as 22 ingredients, each in the exact proportion as required by the type of paint manufactured. To change the recipes quickly, Asian Paints manufactures the paints in batches.  First the 22different solids in powder form are weight – batched to a bag unloading station hopper.  The solids are available in 25 kgs / 50 kgs poly bags & are bought near the unloading hopper on pellets. The entire charging operation was earlier carried out manually using lifts and forklifts for handling of raw material bags.  This led to plenty of dusting and wastages also at the cost of accuracy of recipe. RIECO installed a fully mentioned pneumatic transport system along with necessary dust control equipments. The conveying system components are specially designed to suit the properties of 22 odd raw materials used including certain difficult materials such as TiO2 and steatite. After verifying the weight, the solids are charged into bag unloading station hopper, from this hopper the solids are pneumatically conveyed @ a rate of 11 TPH and 80 mtrs. long to 12 storage hoppers located above each pug mill.

The pneumatic conveying is a lean phase, pressure operated roots blower type, to avoid downtime 1 working + 1 standby roots blower is utilized.  The distribution of solids to 12 storage hoppers is completed by remotely operated divertor valves, at the end of the conveying bin vent filters are provided on each storage hopper to separate solids and air.

By adopting the pneumatic conveying system, Asian Paints has totally eliminated manual feeding as well as dusting problem.  Now the area of pug mill is as clean as a laboratory.

Since the reliability of the system & the system components has to be of the highest order, Asian Paints (I) Ltd., selected RIECO Industries Ltd. as the turnkey supplier for designing, manufacturing, supply, erection & commissioning of modernization project at Ankleshwar Plant for distemper section.  Since the paints manufactured by Asian Paints are of high quality & not permitting any cross contamination or downtime for system components, RIECO selected the in-house specially designed components to suit application viz. Rotary feeders, divertor valves, bin vent filters etc.In a Paint Industry, each batch is expensive & hence a high order reliability is of paramount importance, RIECO has an advantage because of the system design capability & dynamic execution team.

The entire scheme consists of roots blowers, rotary feeders, bin vent filters, electropneumatically operated divertor valves, hoppers, rotary valves, compressors & air dryers, PLC based control panel with MCC.

The project for distemper was a huge success; Asian Paints duplicated the similar system with certain enhancement for their emulsion paint units at Ankleshwar.  Here TiO2 (Titanium Dioxide) is used in a high content, i.e. upto 70% of the batch size & due to its difficult flow properties, it requires special techniques for successful handling.  This unit was installed in a record time and Asian Paints virtually endorsed RIECO Industries system capability by once again repeating the system at their Patancheru plant in Andhra Pradesh and for their green field plant at Sriperumbudur, Chennai.

The customer is happy with the system performance and enormous improvement in work environment and also reduction of labour inputs.