Industry sector: Cosmetics
Company activity: Packaging of liquid and foaming cosmetic or pharmaceutical products, development of formulas and solutions in the cosmetics sector, reformulation and large-scale packaging of household aerosols
Company type: SME
Company founded: 1990–2000
Contacts: Supplies manager – Formulation and cream production manager (responsible for developing manufacturing processes, including filtration, for new packaging formats) – Maintenance manager for lotion packaging.
Company context
To manufacture its products, the company uses various filtration equipment on its cream and lotion production lines.
Filtration challenge
Improvements first had to be made on the cream production line during bag filtration at the pre-packaging stage. The issue encountered here concerned the service life and cost of the filter bags. The company had been using size 2 monofilament filter bags with a filtration threshold of 10 or even 5 µm.
The company also wanted to upgrade the filtration processes involved in lotion manufacturing, specifically during the packaging stage, aimed at product clarification. For commercial reasons, the lotions produced must appear visually clear. The company was looking to filter these lotions continuously throughout the production of a batch without changing filters or any other filtration equipment.
Pemflow filtration solution
For cream filtration, we recommended replacing the existing monofilament bag technology, which was very costly and caused premature filter clogging due to the high viscosity of the product. We suggested using polypropylene felt filter bags, which are far less expensive and allow filtration over a greater media depth, thereby increasing filter service life.
For lotion filtration, we implemented 10-inch pleated filter cartridges with a 0.5 µm filtration threshold. This solution maintains a large filtration surface throughout the production of a given batch and provides significantly better clarification than the previous setup.
Switching to polypropylene felt bag filters improved filter service life by 30% during cream packaging and reduced consumable costs by nearly a factor of 5.
Lotion filtration can now be performed continuously throughout the batch, achieving effective clarification.
Pleated filtration cartridges
Polypropylene bag filter
The savings achieved enabled the company to invest in a filtration skid project, consisting of a size 2 bag filter housing mounted on legs and welded to a wheeled frame, allowing it to be moved directly to the mixing tanks.
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