Based in the Czech Republic, Constellium Decin plant is a leading aluminium extrusions manufacturer in Europe and part of the multinational Constellium group.

The company was founded in 1909 and today has around 800 employees. The plant manufactures customized aluminium extrusions in hard and soft alloys primarily for automotive and industrial applications and is the fourth-largest supplier of tubes, bars and profiles from aluminium and its alloys.

Recently, the company has built a new manufacturing unit where the production started in 2018 on several FANUC machines. With the new facility also came the requirement to keep the workshop as clean as possible and protect the health of the machine tool operators. A coolant must be used during aluminium manufacturing which generates oil mist particles. This can cause maintenance and health issues.

As a trusted supplier of filtration systems for FANUC machines, Filtermist’s Czech distributor WEMAC was asked to help with the issue and fitted each machine with a Filtermist oil mist collector fitted with a submicron S Fusion filter on top.

Constellium, is very focussed on ensuring good indoor air quality, so it agreed to test a brand new self-draining submicron filter FX Fusion - designed for the bigger FX4002 and FX5002 Filtermist units. After three months of use, Wemac’s experienced engineer visited Constellium Děčín to measure the concentration inside the machine and on the outlet of FX Fusion to evaluate the efficiency of the extracting system.

Results showed that the average concentration of 1µm particles was reduced by 97% and the average concentration of 10µm particles was reduced by 98.2 %!

Maximum concentration of oil mist particles on the outlet of the submicron filter is around 0.5 mg/m3, while the norm in the Czech Republic is 5 mg/m3.

Results

Unit: FILTERMIST FX-5002 + FX-FUSION
Machine: FANUC Robodrill α-D21
Application: machining of rear axles for premium automotive brands
Coolant: Paramo L 35 emulsion
Date of installation: August 2019
Date of measuring: November 2019

Although the measured maximum concentration during this exact application did not exceed 30 mg/m3, FANUC Robodrill machines can operate in high speed and under high pressure generating concentrations of particles up to 150 mg/m3. Even then, the concentrations measured on the outlet of S/FX FUSION filter are still within the Czech norm.