Company: Plastratum
Application: Blue etch NDT line
Location: North West, UK
Contract value: £1.5million
Overview: To meet the demands of a high quality, fully tested product, our aerospace customer required a fully automated plant complete with chemical delivery, fume extraction and effluent treatment
The challenges
Whilst the project demanded that our solution delivered NADCAP compliance for the parts processed:
- Temperature control could not be completed using electrical heating;
- Tight space limitations meant a single line was out of the question.
Alternative heating solution
Plastratum undertook an in-depth feasibility study and was able to show the customer that a gas fired thermal fluid boiler and distribution system was a beneficial and cost-effective option which was advantageous to the installation and ideal for the customers’ needs. It was shown that the payback on capital investment would be as little as one and a half years, comparing the electrical costs against the cost of gas.
Overcoming space constraints
Our fully automatic anodising equipment has two parallel legs, which overcame the limitations of the footprint. Plastratum designed a water spray cross transfer from leg one to leg two which enabled the installation to be fully installed with ease.
Each leg has a load/unload station enabling multiple, integrated programming of cleaning and chemical processing simultaneously, realising the benefit of increased output efficiency. This is combined with SCADA and NADCAP data acquisition which is linked to the company’s production server, providing a powerful management and production tool.