Juice Plant Case Study

BJM Pumps Play Trio of Roles at Major Juice Processing Plant

The Company

The company is one of the United States’ largest juice processors and marketers, buying fresh fruit juice from partners and suppliers and turning it into a variety of beverages that are sold around the world. The company produces orange juice at a 720,000 square-foot plant in central Florida. The plant was recently expanded to add a new production line for one of the company’s fastest-growing brands, a storage “tank farm” and to upgrade telecommunications, information technology and other systems.

The Challenge

The challenge for any submersible pump manufacturer is to offer a full line of products that deliver excellent performance and reliability in a wide range of applications, conventional as well as niche. Between the original juice plant’s legacy equipment and new demands created by the recent expansion, the plant required satisfaction of a range of divergent needs: excellent non-solids dewatering performance for stormwater runoff, corrosion-resistance and solids-handling capabilities for acidic wastewater and process water, and high-temperature resistance coupled with solids handling for bottle washing.

The Solution

In early 2010 the company purchased two BJM Pumps SX15CSS stainless-steel, non-clog pumps from Barney’s Pumps of Coral Springs, Florida. These two-horsepower pumps—which have stainless-steel impellers, wear plates, oil housings, pump housings and inner pump tops to resist corrosion and can pass two-inch-diameter solids—performed well in handling the plant’s large volume of slightly acidic, pulpy process and wastewater. Based on that success, the company’s consulting engineer specified BJM pumps for use in all of the company’s plants. About a year after the SX pumps were installed, the central Florida plant bought two BJM S75CF, high-temperature, non-clog Fahrenheit™ pumps for its bottle-washing sump. These 10-horsepower, cast-iron pumps can pass 2 ½’ solids and are engineered to withstand the heat of liquids that are as hot as 200 degrees Fahrenheit; these pumps, too, have performed flawlessly. Finally, in early 2012 the plant ordered two 7 ½-horsepower stainless-steel pumps, BJM Pumps’ Model JX55CSS, for a large, new sump built to handle the extra process water and stormwater runoff generated by the 20 percent expansion in the size of the facility. BJM’s JX pumps are designed for general pumping purposes where the passage or shredding of sizeable solids is not required. The pumps were shipped within two weeks of being ordered; they were installed on rail assemblies within the sump, and the whole system was started up in March. The pumps are excelling at their work, and the company has placed subsequent orders for BJM pumps at other facilities around the country.