Industrial Dust Collectors in the Food & Agricultural Industry – Corn Refining

Aerodyne’s SplitStream Helps Major US Corn Refinery Regain Lost Product

The Problem

One of the largest corn refineries in the United States came to Aerodyne with a common problem seen in the food manufacturing industry: the inefficiencies of their existing dust collector were causing them to lose approximately 50 lbs per hour of very fine material – a sticky corn feed product. Their existing system consisted of a cyclone followed by a wet scrubber; the wet scrubber collected part of the 50-lbs-per-hour loss, but was still inefficient.

The Solution and Measurable Results

After working with Aerodyne’s engineers to find the right solution for retaining this lost product, a SplitStream™ Dust Collector was installed. Aerodyne’s SplitStream™ Dust Collector has no major moving components and can handle a wide range of materials with minimal maintenance. When integrated into an air cleaning system, this cyclonic dust collector greatly extends the life of other process equipment and, in some cases, replaces them completely. Because the SplitStream™ Dust Collector uses no bags or filters, collected particulate can be easily retained, returned to the process, or sent out for disposal.

The SplitStream™ takes the dust-laden gas stream (this application involves the handling of between 7,000 to 9,000 cfm of gases) and splits it into two streams. One stream enters the primary air circuit, and the other is used as a secondary air stream. This arrangement increases the process capacity by the amount of the secondary air stream.

As a result, the corn refining manufacturers saw significantly fewer losses of the sticky corn feed product they were losing to their system’s process as a result of the SplitStream™ installation.