Perhaps one could trace the earliest vacuum cleaner to the UK. In 1901, Bissel developed the idea of vacuum cleaner and demonstrated the concept by sucking the dust through his handkerchief-covered mouth. Later, he went on to make the first vacuum cleaner in the world.
Over the last 100 years, cleaning technology has improved with industry and houses having many different cleaning requirements. It has been proved that mechanical cleaning has come to stay in this world.
The general principle of vacuum cleaner is that the hose is attached to a sealed container with a filter, the air is sucked and the air carries with it the dust and other material to the container via the hose. The incoming air is filtered and the dust gets collected in the container and the air is allowed to pass through the filter from the container. The main components of any vacuum cleaner are a container, motor, fan and filter. Depending on the requirement, these four components are changed suitably.
Over the years, besides cleaning, vacuum technology has been applied on many applications such as material transfer, filtering, evacuation of and segregation of material. Depending on the requirement, many different filters – normal to absolute – and motors have now been developed.
The vacuum cleaner generally has high vacuum and low air displacement. The dust collector has low vacuum and high air displacement.
In 1967, Delstar Pvt. Ltd gave India the first-ever vacuum cleaner and began the journey of introducing the mechanised cleaning technology to the country. Based at Karad, 500km from Mumbai, Delstar, over the last 42 years, has developed and introduced different types of vacuum cleaners to cater to the demands of the customers. These include centralised dust collection system units, dust collectors, material conveying systems, mechanical floor sweepers and many more.
After vacuum cleaners, Delstar developed floor scrubbing machines and wet collection vacuum cleaner in 1974. The floor scrubber was required by industries and utilities to clean floors mechanically. The results after mechanical cleaning were naturally unbelievable. Later on, a combination unit of scrubbing machine and wet pick up vacuum cleaner was introduced.
Next came the floor sweeping machines. These machines were either driven by electric motor by petrol or diesel engines. These machines are required to clean open large areas.
Delstar has also put to use vacuum technology for the plastic industry by introducing hopper loaders and hopper dryers in the year 1995. These machines are auxiliary equipment for plastic moulding/extrusion machines and are used to avoid contamination and spillages of plastic granules, loading and drying of plastic granules. The use of these machines improves the quality of the finished product and speeds up the production process.
In its other range of machines, Delstar’s sump cleaning and oil recycling machine model SCOR200 has been designed to remove physical impurities from cutting oil/coolants used in machine tools. This machine does the job of cleaning the oil and recycling it without disturbing the production cycle.
In some factories, carrying vacuum cleaner to the shop floor is not possible or advisable. In such situations, centralised vacuum system is the best solution. In this system, we have stationed the vacuum producer outside the production area and the pipeline is laid inside with multiple openings. The operator has to carry only the flexible hose with accessories inside the shop floor.
Today, Delstar is equipped to offer cleaning solutions and machines for a wide range of applications – ride-on sweepers and chassis-mounted road sweepers suitable for Indian conditions. These machines bear the hallmark of sturdiness and compatibility to Indian conditions and use.
Mechanised cleaning has come to stay in the areas of health, safety and environment for which Delstar has been striving since 1962.
D. W. Chitale, Managing Director R. M. Joglekar, Technology Advisor, Delstar Pvt. Ltd