New hygiene standards in mechanical engineering!
„Hygienic design refers to the design of parts, components and manufacturing equipment for easy cleaning.“
Nowadays, the term
"hygienic design" is often wrongly associated with the terms "food safety" and "product liability". The
requirements in the food and beverage industry are to produce machines, systems and components in hygienic
design. The target is to avoid various weak points that promote hygiene-related hazards through constructive
design principles of the components. These can have biological, chemical or physical causes. The main focus of
the hygienic design is to provide an easy cleanability of the materials, surfaces and structural
elements.
And thats
the point why we have started to redesign some machine parts of our swing top closure machines in order to
raise them to an even higher level of hygienic design. This optimization primarily affects guide elements such
as the infeed star, the main support star, the outfeed star, the middle bow section and other railing
guides. In addition to a change the color of the plastic components (from black to natural white), the
surfaces, screw connections and attachments have also been completely revised.
With a
constant hygienic development of our alignment unit, we were able to raise the bar even higher in terms of
machine cleanliness. The focus was to provide an open design, which makes cleaning the machine
considerably easier. This open design concept has now been applied and revised to the guide elements. These
elements have now a better design and are made out of white plastic. The colour change makes it easier to
visually check how intense the grade of dirtiness actually is. The plastic parts of the railing guides have
been rounded to ensure drainage.
Our swing
stopper closing machines with a machine size from BVM8 up to BV40 have a curved and electropolished machine
table (arch table) to ensure that liquids drain off automatically. These improvements are part of a long
list of hygiene optimizations that we have carried out on our swing top closure machines in recent years.
Pictures
(Click on photos for a larger view)