How Does a Hopper Loader Work?
Introduction
In the plastic industry, people need to feed material to an injection molding machine continuously. In order to improve production efficiency, the vacuum hopper loader is designed for loading automatically. As everybody can see, material in the vacuum space will fall down because of the pressure difference. “Vacuum conveying – whether single equipment or multiple equipment systems- is, substantially more flexible than the pressure conveying method.”
Definition of Vacuum Hopper Loader
Hopper loader is a kind of machine to feed plastic raw material into hopper receivers through vacuum conveying. In short, it is a device for loading plastic materials by vacuum. It is also named Auto Loader, Plastic Hopper Loader, Vacuum Hopper Loader, etc.
How does It work?
To form a vacuum status, the hopper loader is mounted on top of the destination (drying hopper, mixer, etc). Meanwhile, the material inlet of the hopper loader connects with a flexible hose. And the hose connects with a pickup lance inserted into the material source tank. Most importantly, a small powerful motor creates a vacuum that sucks the material up through the pickup lance. Then the materials flow through the flexible hose into the hopper of the loader. Moreover, there is a simple control board with programmable Load and Dump times in each loader. Therefore, operators can set time for loading and dumping materials.
Application in Plastic Industry
There are loaders mainly for pellets and regrind while others are specifically for powders. The self-contained hopper loader combines hopper and motor into one unit ( see the right picture as below). However, the separated type loader’s hopper is away from the main motor unit (see the picture on the left below). No matter self-contained loaders or separated loaders accomplish the loading process automatically. Thus, it will eliminate the need for a person to climb a ladder to fill materials into a hopper. This saves labor costs, improves production efficiency, reduces material spillage, and increases safety.
Features of LCEQ Vacuum Hopper Loader
- Stainless steel hopper to ensure no contamination of material
- Microcomputer control, simple operation, control precision, and alarm lamp
- A motor protective device can increase the service life
- Material shortage alarm can take the initiative to inform the customer to remove
- Independent filter device, easy clearing, filter windows, convenient customer view filter usage, and periodic cleaning.
See all models of self-contained hopper loaders
