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Marshfield DoorSystems
 Marshfield DoorSystems is a 100-year-old world leader in architectural door systems. In one of the company’s key processes, they mix a 2-part glue to be used in the assembly of wooden components. When the resin and the catalyst are mixed the reaction is so violent that without a lot of mixing energy the resin and catalyst begin reacting at the point of injection. This creates hot spots in the glue and causes a lot of problems in the manufacturing process. The simple solution employed was an agitator in a plastic drum. This was not only very messy, time consuming and inaccurate, but also resulted in a lot of glue being wasted at the end of a shift.
Marshfield turned to Crane to help solve this problem. Crane engineers assessed the process and identified that in line mixing could be done more accurately and efficiently. The usual method for doing this would be to use an in line static mixer. However, a static mixer could not be used because the violent reaction would cause the mixer to plug. Crane recommended a 4-gallon cylinder with an agitator inside to provide the mixing. The catalyst would be injected at the tips of the agitator blades in the proper ratio by using a metering pump on the catalyst and then a mag flow tube on the resin flow. The catalyst pump would ramp up and down based on the flow rate of resin. The resulting solution enabled the plant to very accurately control the ratio of catalyst to resin significantly decreasing the variations in the final product which resulted in a drastic reduction in “out of spec” product produced. |
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