With operational efficiency, safety and sanitation on the minds of food & beverage plant operators everywhere, it’s no wonder that innovation in motors and drives has focused on those areas. Practically nothing moves in a processing plant without these components working properly — they are the workhorses keeping industry on the go and products out the door.
“The primary focus [for motors and drives] is on dependability,” explains Andrew Lorenz, president and CEO of We R Food Safety! Indeed, processors feel the pain when their equipment is at a standstill, according to the “Value of Reliability: ABB Survey Report 2023” published by ABB in October 2023.
Sharing their insights for the report, more than 3,200 global plant maintenance decision-makers in energy generation, plastics & rubber, oil & gas, wind, chemicals, rail, utilities, marine, food & beverage, water & wastewater, and metals The food & beverage sector made up 12% of the respondents, the third-highest sector represented in the survey.
The report notes that, when asked for the top three priorities when purchasing equipment, 46% of respondents mentioned reliability, while safety (43%) and energy efficiency (41%) rounded out the top three.
“While almost half of [all] respondents identified reliability as a top priority when purchasing equipment, only 20% said the same of uptime,” Virve Viitanen, head of global customer care and support at ABB’s Motion Services division, explained in the report. “This underscores a critical point — operators are still not making the connection between the benefits of reliable equipment on uptime, their business reputation and their bottom line.”
Nevertheless, companies expect to increase their investment in reliability and maintenance. In food & beverage specifically, 64% said they would increase their investment in reliability and maintenance over the next three years.
“Investing in reliability is the pathway to maximizing uptime, saving costs, increasing competitiveness and protecting piece of mind,” Viitanen said.
Innovations in motors and drives can help keep equipment dependable and durable, but the conditions in a food processing facility can hamper the longevity of these units and force unique designs to protect them, Lorenz adds. Other factors the processors must consider when it comes to motors and drives are the ease of maintenance of those components, as well as the ability of the unit to withstand sanitation processes that use harsh chemicals and plenty of water.
“The biggest challenge in design is that motors, by their nature, are hard to build so that they can operate dependably in the production environment when they must be sanitized daily or more often,” Lorenz adds. To address such brutal conditions, manufacturers have taken different approaches to innovation.
Van der Graaf (VDG) has engineered drum motor designs to meet processors’ sanitation demands, including the SSV Series Drum Motors, which exceed food & beverage processing’s high sanitation requirements. VDG’s design eliminates sprockets by having the belt profile machined directly onto the stainless-steel drum or the new XP sleeve, which is used with the SSV-XP Drum Motor. This model allows the same drum motor to drive different types of modular conveyor belts by swapping out the sleeve to match the conveyor’s belt profile.
VDG hasn’t lost sight of durability and dependability challenges that processors face. In fact, in 2021, after five years of R&D work, VDG unveiled a new-generation drum motor design that runs cooler than typical drum motors and does not require an external cooling method. This leads to a longer lifespan for the motor.
Meanwhile, Nord Drivesystems has developed a process that penetrates the surface of the aluminum housing to create a permanent surface seven times harder than the original, making it highly resistant to corrosion, acids and alkalis. The nsd tupH Sealed Surface Conversion System creates a surface that maintains the low weight of the aluminum, meaning the load on the system remains minimal and operational costs stay low. The surface will not flake or blister, the company says, and it provides a smooth, easy-to-clean solution.
Ensuring the delicate balance between creating a sanitary environment and developing a rugged motor or drive is critical, and processors should make sure they’re not cutting corners to save on equipment costs.
“To reduce cost many manufacturers have gone to lighter components,” Lorenz adds. “However those components often fail before they should because of corrosion caused by the different sanitizers used in the production environment.”
For processors looking to invest in new motor and drive technologies to increase their plant’s dependability, doing the proper homework can help them avoid reliability issues down the road, keeping their product moving safely through the facility with minimal intervention.
