A leading car manufacturer has achieved significant benefits after installing magnetic filtration units on its gearbox-shaft manufacturing line.

The AutoMags, supplied by the French MMTCI Group, are fully automated filters designed and manufactured by Eclipse Magnetics; they have drastically reduced the level of contamination in the machining coolant, improving both the surface finish of components and the efficiency of the manufacturing process (www.eclipsemagnetics.com).

The car manufacturer has also benefited from a reduction in machine down-time.

The material being machined is steel (grade 27 CrMo4), which is the subject of turning, drilling and deep-drilling processes, and the coolant had a tendency “to become saturated” with particulate.

The car manufacturer had been using a centralised media-based filtration system to which 14 machines were connected, but this did not fully address the problems associated with the particulate building up in the coolant.

Initially, two FiltraMag FM2.0+ units were installed to protect the two machines equipped with high-pressure pumps. These were installed in parallel for a flow of 30m³ per hr.

The second phase included installing a set of Eclipse Magnetics magnetic filters — to filter all the fluid.

This closed-circuit assembly — installed directly on the central filtration system — is based on two AutoMag AM12s. Before the magnetic filters were installed by MMTCI Group, the coolant had a contaminate reading of 556 parts per million.

After a week of using magnetic filtration, this had fallen to 139ppm, and it is now less than 100ppm.