Dust Extraction Down Under - Australian Bakels

In order to control airborne contaminants released during batch weighing of minor ingredients such as colours, flavours, enzymes, emulsifiers etc, Australian Bakels has invested in four 2m downflow booths from Flextraction Ltd.  The booths have been designed specifically to control dust emissions over a wide area.

Australian Bakels, sister company of the UK’s British Bakels, and part of the worldwide Bakels Group, are a major manufacturer of bakery ingredients and they service the Australian and Asian Pacific export markets.   A well established company being founded in 1952, they have over 200 employees and last year manufactured goods in excess of 42,000 Tonnes, made up of dry powder blended bakery goods, liquid and fat blends, icings and fondants, chocolate, flavours and cookie dough.

The downflow booths from Flextraction are of modular design and manufactured from 304 grade stainless steel and incorporate acoustically enclosed fans to minimise overall noise level. The booths have been engineered to operate on a re-circulatory airflow principle providing clean air evenly distributed via a down flow at 0.5m/second. Extraction is through low level primary roughing filters and secondary bag filters.  This enables clean air to be returned via ceiling mounted HEPA (High Efficiency Particle Arrestor) filters that offer 99.95% filtration efficiency and suppressing any dust within the booth working area, downwards away from the operator’s breathing zone. The booths are fitted with three pressure indicating devices continually monitoring the extraction performance, whilst automatically controlling the direct driven variable speed fans to maintain optimum operating conditions.

As the booth operates using continuous re-circulation of the air within the booth, airborne contaminant cannot escape into the external working environment. The modular design of the booths allows a size to be manufactured to suit a given application and they can found in a multitude of industries, not only within bakery environments, these include dye and paint processes, as well as pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing.

Jeremy Bracken, Operations Director of Australian Bakels said: “The downflow booths from Flextraction offered the best value suited to our requirements and our Sister company British Bakels, had successfully installed a booth some 15 years ago. General dust extraction had been investigated but did not meet the quality assurance criteria for limiting cross contamination of allergens.  Our requirements were both quality based and environmental and the booths have provided a big improvement in the working environment of the operators. The booths have exceeded our expectations and we are using them 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.

The whole process from initial enquiry through to installation in Australia went very smoothly and met all our expectations.   

As we have purchased 4 booths it is unlikely that we will purchase any more in the near future, however, we would definitely recommend them to others considering wide are dust control.”