Building Blocks of Effective Magnetic Separation

In light of recent product recalls due to metal contamination from reputable companies like Skoal, King’s Command, Ajinomoto Windsor, and Blue Buffalo, it’s difficult to overstate the importance magnetic technology when it comes to protecting your customers and your brand.

That’s why it pays to be sure your food, grain, milling, or ingredient packaging facility has a complete system in place.  With our fully integrated equipment, Bunting can offer separation, metal detection, and conveyors.

Metal separation utilizes magnetic liquid traps, plate magnets, grate magnets, drawer filters, pneumatic inline magnets, and many other examples.  Most separation equipment can seem a complex feat of engineering based on application and products, but they are all based on the same building blocks. These styles determine how effective the separation of product will be.

There are two basic styles of magnets that we use to build our magnetic separation equipment: cartridges (or “tubes”) and plates.

For example, many of our designs start with a simple disc magnet:

Of course, these aren’t exactly your “average” disc magnets. They are manufactured with powerful rare earth materials like neodymium (NdFeB), which means they are a force to be reckoned with for any metal contamination that makes its way into your product.

We build from the basic disc shape by stacking and aligning them in order to make a column:

That column acts as the backbone for our cartridge magnet:

You can read more about our cartridge magnets—which are the strongest cartridges in the industry—at the end of this post.

Once you have the cartridge, you combine these in order to build a grate magnet:

Grate magnets, like the one you see here can be installed inside hoppers, pits, or chutes where they purify product and catch ferrous contamination. They are usually placed for easy access to clean and can be manufactured in various grades of welding for food, sanitary, and USDA.

When placed inside a housing along with our metal detectable gaskets and grommets, a drawer magnet begins to take shape:

HF Series Drawer Magnets are designed to handle a wide range of separation tasks and can be configured with two or more staggered trays with manual self-cleaning or pneumatic to maximize product safety.

Of course, not everything is built from the basic cartridge. Some separation equipment begins as a plate magnet.  However the underlying logic remains the same. You begin with a high quality magnet:

Then the plate magnetic is built into a precision engineered housing:

An example, as pictured above, is a Pneumatic In-Line Magnet, built for use in dilute phase pneumatic conveying systems. This allows for magnetic protection in horizontal applications without obstructing product flow.

Once these separation products are assembled and installed the customer can take advantage of their product purity and insure the plant is safe from hazardous material. 

Here is an example of a Perfect Plant:

So those are the building blocks of our Magnetic Separation equipment.  But we are innovators. For example, Bunting Magnetics Co. now offers the NUHI™ Neodymium Ultra High Intensity Cartridge Magnet, which is the strongest magnetic cartridge in the industry. The NUHI™ Cartridge amplifies the performance of our Separation Equipment through a stronger magnetic load while maintaining Bunting Magnetics Co. equally strong reputation for durability and quality.

To speak to one of our experts about how Bunting Magnetics Co. can help protect your brand, contact us below:

Phone: 1-800-835-2526

Email: bmc@buntingmagnetics.com