Wilden Donates Saniflo FDA Series AODD Pump To Food Processing Laboratory At Fresno State University

The donated pump, a PS4 model in Wilden nomenclature, will receive hands-on use from the upwards of 80 students who are currently enrolled in Fresno State’s Department of Food Science and Nutrition.

As part of their educational requirements, these students are tasked with producing a wide variety of food products, including jams, jellies, salsas and sauces – all in a processing environment that cannot compromise food quality or safety. The Wilden PS4 pump will play a significant role as the conduit between the manufacturing system’s cooking kettles and filling lines; without it, the students would have to jar their products by hand, a time-consuming and potentially unsanitary process.

“We use the pump to produce the majority of our jarred products,” explained Carmen Licon, Assistant Professor for Fresno State’s Department of Food Science and Nutrition. “We expose the students to food manufacturing on a pilot-plant scale, which involves a lot of lab work. During this time, we teach them about food safety and good manufacturing practices. Last semester, our old diaphragm pump broke down, so we needed to find a new one because we didn’t want to have to jar by hand, which is time consuming and unsafe for students.”

For recommendations on a possible solution, Licon turned to Bret Bookhamer, a Sales Manager at Pumping Solutions, Inc., Ontario, CA, who for several years has been a guest lecturer for the Department of Food Science and Nutrition and Viticulture and Enology at Fresno State, focusing his talks on the operation and uses of industrial pumps in food-manufacturing applications. Since 1995, Pump Solutions has built a reputation as a leading distributor of AODD pump technologies in California and the Southwest, with Wilden among the AODD pump brands that it represents. With all that in mind, Bookhamer recommended the Wilden PS4 pump to Licon and Fresno State – and then worked to have it donated to the program.

“We’re very happy and grateful to him,” said Licon. “He’s very friendly and approachable, his classes are easy to understand, and students feel comfortable to ask questions. When our old pump broke, I immediately contacted him to get a quote for a new one, or to ask for an old pump to be donated since our resources are limited, and he said he’d work with Wilden to get the pump for us, to donate it.”

What the program received was a pump that has been specially designed to meet all of the needs of a food-manufacturing operation. Wilden FDA Series pumps possess Tri-Clamp connections and a straight flow-through design that gives them the versatility to pump shear-sensitive liquids with a wide range of viscosities and solids sizes, including the high-acid, high-sugar and high-fat media that are found in many of the products produced by the Fresno State students. The pumps have passivated stainless steel components with various surface finishes, which allows them to comply with all FDA, CE, 1935/2004/EC and ATEX regulations regarding the sanitary and intrinsically safe production of food products.

The pump’s Pro-Flo SHIFT Air Distribution System (ADS) is the industry’s most efficient as its design automatically restricts the amount of air that enters the pump, eliminating any overcharging of the air chamber with no reduction in flow rate. The result is an AODD pump that delivers up to a 60 percent reduction in air consumption and 34 percent more product yield than competitive models. Finally, the pump is outfitted with Pure-Fuse Integral Piston Diaphragms. The design of these diaphragms features an integrated one-piece piston that eliminates the trap areas and abrasion that are common with other diaphragm styles, resulting in a cleaner, more durable pumping process.

“The pump is easy to use and set up; it didn’t cost us a lot of time or effort to figure out how to use it,” said Licon. “For cleaning, we do clean-out-of-place. We basically take it apart, run a cycle with soap and water and it’s ready to be used again. With the older pump, we couldn’t do that, we had to flush a lot of water and soap until the water ran clean. With this new pump, it takes around 20 minutes to clean.”

The Wilden FDA Series pump arrived on campus in October 2019 and immediately went to work. Licon is looking forward to the spring semester and summer internships when it will be used to help produce the products that are featured at Fresno State’s Gibson Farm Market, the on-campus food store where the products that have been grown, processed and packaged by the Fresno State students are sold.

“Overall, I am very happy so far and would definitely recommend the Wilden pump to others,” said Licon. “It’s very easy to use and clean, very user-friendly, just plug it in and it’s ready to go. It’s definitely a good asset for us, a welcome upgrade from what we had before. I love it. Now, I can teach my students how the pump works, they can see inside it and they can see how the diaphragms work. I would really just like to thank Wilden and Pumping Solutions for the donation.”