The difficulty of conveying viscous liquids, such as lotions, creams, gels and slurries, presents a series of challenges in the manufacturing environment. Millions of dollars are lost annually in the cosmetic, chemical, food and personal care industries due to scrapped product, which simply can’t be extracted from disposable form-fit liquid liners.

The advent of the Xtrakt™ System from ILC Dover provides an innovative solution. It has been designed specifically to mitigate wasted product, improve operating efficiencies and reduce environmental impact, while simultaneously promoting operator safety. Here’s how it works.

Handling viscous liquids in any manufacturing industry is extremely challenging. Current processing of these viscous liquids involves dispensing the end product into a liner in a rigid intermediate bulk container (IBC), commonly known as a form-fit liquid liner. These liners are used to provide a high level of cleanliness and robust containment to protect the end product, while offering disposability at the end of dispensing.

With typical nominal capacities of 315 US gallons, these form-fit liners are placed into rigid-walled intermediate bulk containers (IBCs), and filled with the liquid end product, which is then transported to individual stations for dispensing and final packaging. During the dispensing process, a positive displacement pump (diaphragm or piston) is typically deployed to convey the material from the IBC’s form-fit liner to some form of product packaging machine for incremental dispensing of the liquid into tubes, jars, pouches, cans, tubs or pails.

Depending on the viscosity and flow characteristics of the material, residual product at the end of liner pumping frequently exceeds 10 kg and can range in excess of 40 kg, even with the use of what has been, until now, state-of-the-art, air-assist liquid liner systems. This residual remains despite the frequent steps often taken by the operators to manually manipulate the form-fit liners (tugging, twisting, lifting) or even manually tilt the IBC to allow for increased gravity flow.

This white paper explores the differences between ILC’s XtraktTM System and air-assisted liners in recovering viscous liquids, slurries and gels. Cost savings are significant, as are operator safety and handling improvements. Download it here.