Why does hygienic equipment need special products?
Hygienic equipment is becoming increasingly important within companies nowadays, and ensuring they are resistant to aggressive washdowns is essential. Contamination is detrimental in certain industries, it can cost companies thousands in downtime and service costs. With this in mind, lots of companies are investing in hygienic equipment that are not only hard wearing and suitable for the application but are also resistant to aggressive washdowns.
What constitutes hygienic equipment?
Aggressive washdowns are usually high-pressured rinsing of parts of a machine with a combination of water and chemical solutions. The chemical balance within the solution will depend on the application however some of the chemical solutions can be extremely harsh and require special properties for the components in the machines. Primarily, the sort of applications that use these washdowns are pharmaceutical and food and beverage and high temperature requirements are very common in these applications to kill any hidden germs.
With these washdowns, if the products being washed are not resistant to the chemicals it can cause more harm than good.
Are igus® products resistant to aggressive washdowns?
As igus® offer products that are suited to a wide range of applications, it is essential that a portion of those products can withstand chemical washdowns including high temperatures, chemical resistant, whilst maintaining the hard wearing, stable properties.
Below are a couple of the key igus® products used in hygienic design machines that are all resistant to aggressive washdowns.
TH3 energy chains
The TH3 e-chain® was the first hygienic design energy chain developed for industries requiring FDA compliancy. The special design of this chain ensures stability for guiding the cables, and with the open design, there are no dead spaces for germs to form. With a large temperature range, this energy chain is perfectly suited for food and beverage, packaging and filling machines. With its bright blue appearance, the TH3 energy chain is perfect for food applications.
Stainless steel drylin® linear systems
Stainless steel is the go-to for hygienic equipment. It is resistant to aggressive washdowns, is aesthetically pleasing and can withstand a large range of temperatures. Hygienic applications such as food and packaging need FDA compliance so changing from steel to stainless steel is an easy alternative. We not only offer stainless steel shafts, we offer stainless steel linear systems, leadscrews, conveyor rollers and trough. The trough can support energy chains when being used in long travel applications.
iglidur® A500
This bearing material offers the highest temperature range, has the best chemical resistance, is resistant to media, edge pressure and shock impact. This bearing material was designed especially for difficult applications in the food industry and competes with conventional materials such as PEEK. The iglidur® A500 material comes in various forms such as plain bearings, xiros® ball bearings, stock bar and stock plate. This allows us to support a wide range of customers and applications where there are issues.
Ensuring that the products used in hygienic machines are resistant to high temperatures, aggressive washdowns and chemicals, all whilst maintaining a high level of contamination-free operation is crucial, and thanks to a large range of products across all product groups at igus®, we can support hygienic machines across the world.
FDA is such an important issue for many companies so to help ensure the best products are available we have a full range which can be found here https://www.igus.co.uk/info/fda-eu-compliant. This gives you an idea of the other products not featured in this blog.
For more blogs on the topic of FDA please visit https://blog.igus.co.uk/?s=fda and if you have an application that requires products to be resistant to aggressive washdowns, please contact us to see how we can help!
