ARO EVO Series™ Electric Diaphragm Pump for the Starch Glue Industry

Jun 5, 2023 | ARO Pumps

Choose a top efficiency pump for heavy-duty application

Cardboard manufacturing is a high energy-consuming industry, due to the large volumes required and the characteristic of the raw material used, some manufactures are forced to work 24/7 at a heavy duty industrial rate.
Starch glue feeding and recirculating line is one of those rigorous manufacturing processes. Starch Glue is used to bond different paper layers in the corrugated cardboard production, the quality of glue is crucial for producing high quality cardboard.

Starch glue has to flow continuously to avoid filming, it is highly sensitive to overheating and high shear. For those reasons, diaphragm pumps have always been the “pump of choice” for this application. However, with energy prices increasing and the environmental impact  of energy usage itself, more focus has been directed towards reducing energy processing costs. Air production in manufacturing plants is one of if not the most expensive energies to use in production.

In these particular success stories, customers were intrigued about an electric style pump for their particular applications and the EVO Series Electric Diaphragm was the perfect answer!

Customer Type

Both of these stories come from large companies producing corrugated cardboard all the way to producing cardboard boxes for various industries. They produce boxes by starting from paper rolls and producing their own corrugated cardboard. Both customers have multiple corrugating machines running simultaneously at variable duty according to production needs.

The Application

Customer 1: Two different types of starch glue,
single-faced and double-faced layers, both lines are feeding simultaneously 3 corrugating machines that run at different duties according to production needs.
Customer 2: One type of starch glue is used to feed 4 corrugating machines running simultaneously at different load according to production needs
Both customers where looking for an electric solution

Both customers where looking for an electric solution able to meet the following criteria:

• High efficiency to reduce energy consumption
• Handle variable viscous fluids, Starch glue viscosity could vary between 1500 and 3000 cPs
• Gentle pumping, to avoid damaging the quality of the glue and consequently damage to the finished product
• Self-regulating, to adapt to demand variation
• Pump to be easily integrated in the system for remote monitoring and control.
• Easy maintenance, to avoid long downtime and production loss

The Solution

Technical Observations

In addition to the advantages already described, customers experienced:
• Low noise operations: reduced noise compared to other positive displacement pumps
• Smoother flowrate to corrugating machines: thanks to its special three chamber design and precise torque
control, the pump is able to provide a consistant flowrate with little pulsation
• Incredible reduction of energy consumption: after a few weeks of operation, one of the customers calculated
their ROI of less than 14 months

Customer’s Testimonial

“When we installed the pump, we tested it by simulating a sudden increase of required flowrate at corrugating machines and we have been impressed on how the pumps react promptly without any loss of flowrate….the pumps are perfectly self regulating. There is no longer a need to change the pump set up when moving from full production load to recirculating load!

Glue Kitchen Manager at Customer 1

“Moving to to the EVO Series pump was a wonderful choice! One pump can actually do the job that two pumps were doing in the past! This allows us to run only one pump at a time, while having a stand-by pump ready to run if needed!

With EVO Series™, we are not only reducing our energy consumption but also increase our productivity rate by reducing at minimum our downtime and increasing maintenance intervals!

Maintenance Manager at Customer 2