How You Can Meet the High Requirements for Bearings and Guidance Systems in the Food Industry
The legal regulations for food production are particularly strict in respect to hygiene and safety – for the production processes as well as for the processed raw materials. Considering the constantly changing formulas and the globally oriented ingredients market, this is a major challenge. To ensure that food safety is always guaranteed in your production, it is important to consider the following questions:
Which regulations must be observed in food production and what does this mean for the production machines?
How can the maintenance and servicing of machines be optimized in line with the regulations for food safety?
Strict Regulations for Food Production
Machines Optimally Designed for the Food Industry
Machines for this industry are subject to strict hygiene and quality requirements, because contamination from operating materials or abrasion must not be allowed to enter the food and beverages under any circumstances. Among other things, this requires food-grade sealing and lubrication solutions with NFS-H1 approval.
To avoid contamination and comply with the relevant machine directives, you should use seal concepts that are designed specifically for food production. These seals have higher resistance to chemicals, temperature, and abrasion. They can also withstand the intensive cleaning processes that often involve aggressive chemicals. Food-grade lubricants are also important. To make maintenance even easier, you can use relubrication-free lubrication solutions such as Lubtect.
Condition-Oriented Maintenance and Servicing of Machines
You can only ensure lasting food safety for your products if your machines function with absolute reliability. The systems often operate at high speeds and accelerations and perform very precise motion sequences. In addition, they often operate around the clock. With regular – but preferably not too frequent – maintenance and servicing of your machines, you can ensure high production quality on a permanent basis. This will also increase your efficiency.
Extended maintenance intervals with innovative coating solutions
By providing excellent corrosion and wear protection for all your bearings, you can ensure that your machines in food production will operate smoothly. Coating solutions can make the bearings less prone to wear or more corrosion-resistant and protect against electrical current damage.
Predictive condition monitoring with intelligent tools
Imagine that you could always service a machine at exactly the right time. Predictive and condition-oriented maintenance makes this possible. Digital tools such as OPTIME’s continuous automatic analyses help in this process. This makes it easier to plan maintenance and servicing tasks. Digital system monitoring can already detect risks of malfunctions weeks in advance and indicate the possible causes.