Lonati Spa

Lonati Spa
Today LONATI has a management capable of anticipating the trends of every continent and an agile structure, oriented to the needs of its commercial partners, with a continuous updating of technologies and personnel. The industrial area is located in Brescia in the San Polo area, on an area of 80,000 square meters, of which 24,500 are covered.

Website: https://www.lonati.com/

Lonati Spa

Leading world manufacturer of sock-knitting machines, Lonati chose AR Filtrazioni as partner to install air cleaners of fume and oil mist on their machining centers, improving the production efficiency, the quality of the air in the workshop and decreasing the risks of downtime.

10,000/12,000 hosiery machines each year, 600 employers, an area of 80,000 square meters of which 24,500 are occupied by buildings and the control of 65% of the world market of sock-knitting machines. These facts are enough to explain the industrial importance of Lonati SpA, historical company founded sixty years ago by the knight Francesco Lonati and now rooted in industrial foundations, LONATI GROUP benefits from absolute world leadership in the textile machinery sector, a position supported by reliability and efficiency, the best know-how, ongoing innovation and unsurpassed standards of quality for products and services.

A modular approach
In the past the plant for suction of oil mist and smoke produced during machining processing of machine tools was centralized. The centralization worried about the possibility of an arrest.
“As maintenance responsible – Pasotti explains – I needed to avoid that a problem on the vacuum system involves a production standstill of 47 machine tools, with very heavy effects for our company. Furthermore, the large dimension of the vacuum system needs several days in the event of a repair of it.
But not only the production continuity Lonati needed to guarantee; they wanted to overtake another criticalities regarding their fume vacuum system.
“An important subject is the recycling of the oil (Lonati machines work with straight oil): the centralized system we had in the past mixed different oils coming from several machines. The different characteristics of each oil impeded the recycling of that oil, particularly for more delicate machining processing.”

From centralization to the hold at source of the fume

The cooperation starts with AR FILTRAZIONI, with the installation of a pilot plant on a more recently machining center. “After a yearly test – underlines Angelo Riceputi of AR Filtrazioni – with Lonati we decided to equip every machine tool with an air cleaner, taking care to optimize them on the basis of the characteristics of the single machine and the metal working (for example the aluminium metal working emits more fume.) We utilized a modular combined filtration system for a longer life of the last stage of EPA filter.
Some machines are equipped with a high performances pre- filtration system, with the centrifugal condensed technology, applied by AR Filtrazioni.”

Oil consumption reduced by 15%. A huge saving for Lonati.

“Every single air cleaner recovers the oil, conveying it immediately to the machine tool, avoiding contamination with another types of oil. In this way we reduced of 15% our oil consumption and increased the efficiency and quality of our metal working.”