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A leading pharmaceutical company had several proprietary ingredients that severely agglomerated into a single 2000lb lump when packaged in bulk bags. The pharmaceutical intermediates had clay like consistency that required extensive pre-conditioning prior to attempting to discharge the material from the bags. The existing bulk bag unloading equipment manufactured by another supplier was not robust enough to cause the material to discharge from the bag so the operators resorted to "pre-conditioning" the bag with whatever means they had available. It is not uncommon in these cases to see operators using baseball bats, sledgehammers, and fork trucks to get the material to discharge from the bulk bags. Discharging materials that were in a blocked condition with substandard discharging equipment was extremely labor intensive and resulted in unsafe operating conditions.

The company contacted NBE for a solution to their discharging problems based on NBE's reputation for supplying reliable equipment that provides real results to customers' problems. While analyzing the application an additional challenge was discovered. The location where the bag needed to be pre-conditioned required the pre-conditioning equipment to be frequently moved in and out of position. The complete solution had to be fork truck portable.

NBE's solution to this customer's challenges was to utilize their deblocking ram technology on a portable frame to greatly reduce the hardened material lump size so that it can easily pass through the discharge spout of a bulk bag. The hydraulic deblocking rams fold into the unit for ease of portability throughout the plant. A customer supplied hoist positions the bag within the bulk bag conditioner (the unit can include a dedicate hoist integrated into the framework). Multiple ribs along the deblocking ram face plates direct powerful point loads into the hardened material. This results in the material being fractured into very small lumps within the bag without causing any damage to the bag itself. An adjustable pressure switch controls the compression force for different materials. The low pressure hydraulic system provides a very smooth and controlled operation.

Implementation of the portable bulk bag conditioner eliminated the need for the operators beat on bags with sledge hammers and baseball bats. The time to discharge a complete bag was reduced from 1 1/2 hours to 15 minutes which greatly improved the productivity and throughput of the process, as well as drastically improving operator safety.