So you don't lose a single drop of the wee dram
15 Jan 2000
Further down the line in its blended whisky business, United Distillers has recently spent £5.2million converting its Cambus site in Clackmannanshire from a distillery into a major cask filling centre and bulk storage facility for the finished products.
Spirit produced at distilleries throughout Scotland arrives at the site by road and is stored in stainless steel tanks before being filled into traditional oak casks for maturation. When the site was first converted, transfer rates around the plant were limited to around 70m3/h, through 3in piping and 3in positive displacement piston flowmeters. But United wanted to increase flows to 90m3/h to increase the speed of tanker loading and unloading, so instrumentation specialists Cockayne of East Kilbride organised trials of Fisher-Rosemount's Micro Motion Elite Coriolis meters on 4in lines.
These demonstrated that the meters could handle the 90m3/h flow rates, so today there are twelve CMF300 Elite meters at Cambus. Four meter road tanker on- and off-loadings, where they have helped cut the time the 27 000 litre tankers spend in the loading bays from one hour to 35 minutes.
Five more CMF300s are used for transferring spirit between various storage and filling tanks; another one controls bulk loading and unloading at Cambus' 12 malt storage tanks; and the remaining two are used in reduction or dilution processes.
To gain HM Customs and Excise site approval, United had to show the meters were capable of the required accuracy. Approved tests recorded accuracies to 0.1 per cent or better, with even 0.05 per cent being achieved. And in the first 12 months of operation the meters were only recalibrated once, despite having measured over 52million litres of spirit.
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