Vast Experience Testing Hundreds of Materials Ensures Every Conveyor Works as Specified

We received an inquiry from the owner of a nutrition company who asked how fast we could deliver a pneumatic vacuum conveying system. He had recently automated a few steps in the packaging line with excellent results in line speed and labor savings and wanted to add automation to the processing and filling lines as quickly as possible. He’d had enough of loading heavy bags of vitamin C powder and filler into the mixer and cleaning up the dust and spillage so automating this step with a conveying system seemed an obvious place to start.

After waiting more than six months from purchase order to installation for the automated tablet counter, it came as a surprise that we’d be able to spec and quote a pneumatic vacuum conveying system within a few days of our first conversation and deliver the finished system ready for installation about seven to 10 weeks later. How??

“We’ve done this before,” I explained, “hundreds upon hundreds of times.”

Volkmann was founded almost 50 years ago. We have conveyors running in food, chemical, pharmaceutical, and other plants all over the world transferring every type of material from fine powders and irregular flakes to pellets, tablets, and even hazardous metal powders for 3D printing. Regulated, non-regulated, sanitary, cleanroom, one material stream or multiple streams, sticky, free-flowing, ignitable, we’ve already designed a conveying system to operate in almost every conceivable situation and tested hundreds upon hundreds of materials. So we have a head start when it comes time to quote a new project.

In fact, we’d already tested vitamin C powder. We still highly recommend running a test in our test laboratory with every material to be conveyed for every conveying system but our vast experience cuts down on the trial and error and helps the process move faster. Every day we save in testing means the conveyor arrives a day earlier. It also ensures that when it’s installed, everything works as specified, and keeps working as specified.

Using our pneumatic vacuum conveyors to transfer powdered ingredients to the mixer is a very common installation for us so I pointed out that we could also automatically transfer the finished tablets from the tablet press directly to the bottle filling line or to a container for storage. This creates a sealed system upstream and downstream of the tablet press that prevents contamination and protects the tablets from chipping. And no one has to lift buckets of pills to load the hopper of the tablet counter.

Have we already tested your material? See partial list of materials that move in Volkmann conveyors here.