This question came up to me the other day from a customer in the automotive component industry in Monterrey, Mexico. He was interested in a “sump sucker” type of cleaner for his coolant. But he had one stipulation; he wanted to clean his coolant “on the fly” so to speak so he did not have to turn off his CNC equipment to facilitate the cleaning process.

His original inquiry involved a simultaneous in/out function of the coolant being processed through. We could not accommodate him with a machine that was quite in this nature. However, we do have a product that is the next best thing. Basically, as quickly as the coolant is sucked into the barrel of a Chip Trapper, it is being filtered and is immediately ready to be dispensed back into the machining center sump tank. There is one big benefit in doing it this way. That is the user can pull in all chips that accumulate in the fluid at one time to insure a cleaner end product when the coolant is pumped back into the tank. The other way, would involve recycling a lot of coolant that has already gone through the filtering process and so you end up wasting time re-filtering coolant that has already been processed once. If you have a product like Chip Trapper which is available in sizes to hold up to 110 gallons, you can suck all of the coolant out of the machine in less than 5 minutes so it can be filtered and put right back into the sump. The whole process could take place in as little as 10 minutes depending on how much cleaning in the sump area the customer prefers to do.

That means that a coolant tank could be emptied and re-filled again in as little time as it takes for an operator to go on break or to go to lunch. If you are pressed for time to get in and do coolant maintenance on a regular basis, then perhaps the Chip Trapper would be the answer to your maintenance and up-time concerns.

Neal Raker, Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com