The Cape Town Service Centre for Switzerland-based multinational plant equipment manufacturing group Bühler is in the process of significantly expanding its servicing and equipment refurbishment capacity. The Cape Town facility specialises in handling milling rolls and dies for the food industry and the animal feed industry, not only in the Western Cape but across the whole of Southern Africa. Its customers include most of South Africa’s top food brands.

The expansion will also allow the service centre to handle Bühler’s latest technology for milling rolls, called TVM, which is short for temperature vibration monitoring. This puts a sensor inside the roll, allowing the user to ascertain and monitor the heat and vibration experienced by the roller. This will improve the management of the equipment and so its efficiency.

“The expansion of our Cape Town operation allows us to both service more customers and to provide extra services, including the refurbishing of Bühler-manufactured machinery, to Bühler standards,” explains Bühler Southern Africa technical adviser Marc Barris. (Bühler Southern Africa currently has service centres in Cape Town, Lusaka (Zambia) and Johannesburg, the last also hosting the head office, which service a wide range of industries, across the whole of Southern Africa.) The expansion project should be completed by late January or early February, next year.

Regarding the refurbishment of the milling rolls, which look like great metal rolling pins, subtly cut with fine spiral grooves, the expansion will effectively double the service centre’s capacity. So far this year, the facility has refurbished 380 of these rolls.

Further, next year the Cape Town Service Centre will start refurbishing the TVM milling rolls. “We’ll be the only service centre able to refurbish TVM rolls in the whole of Africa,” he highlights.

Dies are wide, rotating, perforated rings. In operation, they are usually fitted on their inside with press rolls, which force feed through the perforations to form pellets. The number of dies to be serviced and reprocessed is less than that for rolls but is nevertheless significant.

Strikingly, the Cape Town Service Centre has been running uninterruptedly and entirely on solar power for the past 11 months. “We have 80 panels, with a total generating capacity of 230 kW,” reports workshop foreman Hugo Bruwer. “We have eight lithium batteries for backup, and for use on the short winter days, and four inverters. That’s not only enough to power everything we now have, but also to provide all the power for our expanded facility. We haven’t bought any electricity since we commissioned our solar system. We’re saving R12 000/month.”

Use of solar energy also fits with the global Bühler group’s commitment to reducing its carbon footprint. The Cape Town facility never used diesel generators during loadshedding, for example.

This year also saw the service centre achieve ISO 9001 certification, faster than usual, which Barris credits to the hard work of the centre’s staff. And it passed its latest RMA Safety Audit, achieving a score of 98%.