From static management and web cleaning technologies to energy-efficient compressed air technology, our solutions help customers boost productivity, safety, quality, and profitability. Our ‘Engineered to Perfection’ series spotlights the people who make our well-engineered solutions possible.
This month we meet David Rogers, Technical Director at Meech.
David joined Meech not long after leaving Oxford University. In that time, the company has won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise three times and become one of the world’s leading manufacturers of static control, web cleaning and compressed air technologies, supplying equipment across the globe.
This kind of growth can only come from sustained product quality, innovation and customer satisfaction, and David clearly enjoys making sure this is what Meech delivers.
One of David’s roles is developing sustainable solutions for manufacturing sites with complex or unusual static or contamination issues. He cites an example of a company manufacturing plastic and aluminium caps and closures for the packaging industry.
“Obviously, it’s essential that the closures and caps are scrupulously clean when they come off the line, and to achieve this the company was using compressed air cleaning systems. This was proving to be an expensive and not entirely effective solution. Compressors can account for up to 40 per cent of facility energy bills, and the systems can, over time, introduce mist and dust. Others can create dangerous levels of noise.”
David and his team of engineers developed a bespoke solution of ionising bars or ‘static bars’ with multiple high-quality nozzles that could be retrofitted to the existing operating lines. Operating almost silently and with little or no compressed air, the ionising system prevents static charges holding the dust, and a fast-moving beam of laminar air allows any contaminants to be removed and channelled into an air handling unit. Passing through the air handling unit, the air is cleaned and can then be recirculated.
“This is a great application of green credentials,” David explained. “We studied the problem and developed a solution which allowed the customer to reduce their energy bills and increase yields. It marked a breakthrough in clean operating in the caps and closures sector.”
Never one to rest on his laurels, David and his team then worked to enhance this system by switching it to DC rather than AC current and developed the smart technology which enables multiple ionising bars to be monitored and adjusted through a ‘one-touch’ screen control centre.
David has a wealth of examples spanning primary and tertiary packaging where his team have helped businesses improve yields and reduce costs.
“Misbehaving inkjets, printing machinery and vial misfilling are problems we enjoy solving,” he explained. He describes the pharmaceutical filling plant that inspired the Meech hygienic ionising bar:
“Very accurate quantities of drugs have to be administered in vials. Static charges can cause inaccuracies; you either get the incorrect quantity or false rejections of the positively filled vial.”
Meech developed hygienic ionising bars where the combination of its precision engineering, smooth design and enhanced components means they meet the most exacting standards of hygiene for use in sterile areas, solving the vial wastage problem for this customer.
The pharmaceutical sector is a helpful testing ground because standards and processes established here have many applications in the wider packaging industry.
“An inkjet system was misbehaving at a pill packaging plant on the south coast. Static charges were causing dirt on the boxes which was then obscuring the writing. This vital information has to be legible. If it can’t be read, it would have to be ditched so the impact on yield could be dreadful. There can be no risk with print quality.”
David’s team developed a bespoke solution of ionising nozzles that fitted in more than 30 machines, producing clean, accurate labelling on lines that were able to run longer, with no impact on quality.
Many applications which now seem commonplace have been subject to improvement by David and his team.
“We’re always getting excited by new products or improvements to existing ones. Our teams across the world, like the folk at MESA in Belgium, have such in-depth knowledge and experience themselves, they know when an improvement can be made to a manufacturing line or an OEM’s equipment. After a visit to a client site, they’ll bring back a paper on the problem which the engineering team here will work on together.
“Meech’s solutions for Material Directional Orientation (MDO) are a great example of the static management and contamination solutions we’ve developed which are at the leading edge of packaging, that will benefit everyone who is working to reduce waste and improve environmental credentials in this sector.”
To learn more about the diverse applications of Meech’s solutions, visit: https://meech.com/applications/