Innovation from proven technology

Because of the dust which aris­es when prod­ucts are cre­at­ed, grind­ing places par­tic­u­lar­ly high demands on the tech­nol­o­gy used. The design of a grind­ing plant with regard to safe­ty, for both machines and their oper­a­tors. The pres­sure shock resis­tant design of the com­plete grind­ing sys­tem up to an explo­sion over­pres­sure of 10 bar(g) is the most fre­quent­ly used ver­sion, which, how­ev­er, is asso­ci­at­ed with a high lev­el of equip­ment and cor­re­spond­ing space requirements.
Thanks to the ATEX-com­pli­ant Con­dux® Com­pact plant con­cept, the instal­la­tion of a high per­for­mance grind­ing plant for numer­ous prod­ucts is now much eas­i­er, since explo­sion pro­tec­tion valves or explo­sion sup­pres­sion devices, explo­sion iso­la­tors, fans and even con­ven­tion­al dust fil­ter sys­tems are no longer required with the new­ly devel­oped plant concept.
The idea of a com­pact grind­ing sys­tem is not new but exist­ing solu­tions show sig­nif­i­cant dis­ad­van­tages when it comes to clean­ing efforts and hygien­ic design. NETZSCH has there­fore improved the deci­sive points of its con­cept once again: The foot­print or space require­ment of the com­pact plant is 80 % less than that of com­pa­ra­ble stan­dard grind­ing plants with the same through­put capac­i­ties. This also has an effect on the invest­ment costs, which are approx­i­mate­ly 30 % low­er. By using the new­ly devel­oped CycloFil cyclone fil­ter in the sys­tem, the inte­grat­ed pre-sep­a­ra­tion of the grind­ing stock and the recir­cu­la­tion of the process gas allow a fil­ter area that is over 90 % small­er than that of com­pa­ra­ble mill sizes. With CycloFil, the degree of sep­a­ra­tion can be adapt­ed to the oper­a­tor’s require­ments by means of exchange­able immer­sion tubes.
These fea­tures of the new sys­tem result in var­i­ous advan­tages. For exam­ple, the grind­ing sys­tem can be eas­i­ly inte­grat­ed into exist­ing pro­duc­tion sys­tems thanks to the min­i­mal space require­ment, and the nec­es­sary clean­ing when chang­ing prod­ucts is extreme­ly quick thanks to easy access to the parts in con­tact with the product.
The well-proven Impact Mill Con­dux® is the basis machine of this grind­ing sys­tem. The prod­ucts are ground with­in this mill main­ly by impact and shear­ing action. For use with a wide vari­ety of prod­ucts and final fine­ness­es, this machine is avail­able in var­i­ous exe­cu­tions, as either a blast mill, pin-disc mill or wing-beat­er mill.Press release – NETZSCH Grind­ing & Dis­pers­ing In con­trast to con­ven­tion­al grind­ing plants, the pro­cess­ing gas in the streams in a cir­cu­lar motion. The prod­uct is fed direct­ly to the mill via a pres­sureshock-resis­tant rotary valve and dis­charged after the grind­ing process via a sep­a­ra­tor with air lock. Par­al­lel to this, the addi­tion­al rins­ing air fed through the valves and mill bear­ing is con­tin­u­ous­ly dis­charged through the CycloFil to pre­vent a build-up of pres­sure. A sub­se­quent aspi­ra­tion sys­tem gen­er­ates the vac­u­um need­ed to sta­bilise the sys­tem pressure.
Thanks to the inno­v­a­tive CycloFil cyclone fil­ter, the sup­plied ener­gy is dis­si­pat­ed via the prod­uct and the sys­tem sur­face, so that no addi­tion­al cool­ing is required. The warmth pro­duced by the grind­ing process is main­ly com­pen­sat­ed along with the prod­uct when it leaves the machine and to a small­er extent by the sys­tem sur­face, and is there­fore through­put dependent.
The expect­ed tem­per­a­ture increase, for e.g. of ground pow­dered sug­ar (d90 = 100 μm) is nor­mal­ly in the range of ∆T = 10–25°C. For a large range of prod­ucts the warm­ing has no influ­ence on the qual­i­ty or the down­stream process. For the grind­ing of par­tic­u­lar­ly tem­per­a­ture-sen­si­tive prod­ucts, the sys­tem can be addi­tion­al­ly cooled with liq­uid nitro­gen. Espe­cial­ly the degree of inno­va­tion of the Sys­tem was con­firmed recent­ly by the Fi Europe Inno­va­tion Award jury, who award­ed the fine impact mill Con­dux® Com­pact as the win­ner of the Food Tech Inno­va­tion Award for the most inno­v­a­tive tech­ni­cal pro­cess­ing solu­tion for food ingredients.