How Does Ring Blower Work in Food Industry?

The food industries can have many messy processes, whether it is poultry evisceration, deboned waste conveying, bottling, or sugar cake filtration. Liquid ring vacuum pumps (LRVP’s) are often utilized as the backbone of these processes because they can handle the soft solids, debris, and particles that can easily get sucked into the vacuum pump. So how does a LRVP work, why does it work in these processes, and how to make sure they keep working?

How Does a Liquid Ring BlowerWork?

Over the years, some call the liquid ring a “water piston pump”, because it acts as a liquid piston under the centrifugal force from the rotor assembly. Here is how it accomplishes this.  In this cross-sectional view of a Nash conical LRVP, note the rotor assembly (white outlined circle) sits off-centered from the pump body (red outlined circle).

Figure 1. The blue ring between the housing and rotor is a ring of liquid, typically water, that is created from the spinning rotor. The space between two rotor blades is called a bucket.

Figure 2. During operation, when a bucket (the space between the two highlighted rotor blades) is at the bottom of the rotation, it is filled with water.

Figure 3. As the bucket moves toward the top of the rotation, water retreats away from the center of the rotor due to the centrifugal force of the spinning rotor. This pulls gas into the bucket through the inlet port.

Figure 4. As the bucket returns to the bottom of the rotation, water is forced back into the bucket, the gas is pushed out of the pump through the discharge port in a gas and water mixture.

Figure 5. The water in each bucket acts as the mechanical piston in a cylinder, constantly pulling in gas and pushing out gas and water mixture.