Wall Mounted Extraction Arms for a Flavor Laboratory | Zoom Essence

The Solution

Labs USA specified a set of wall mounted extraction arms for the bench stations. Each station received a standard three inch diameter extraction arm on a four foot vertical wall bracket, so the arm mounts on the wall behind the bench and reaches out over the work surface, then folds back against the wall when the station is being cleaned or reset.

Two hood styles were supplied deliberately. A fourteen inch clear dome hood gives a wide capture area with a view through the hood, which suits open blending and pouring where the chemist needs to watch what is happening underneath. A twelve by fourteen inch square hood sits closer and flatter, which suits a fixed piece of equipment or a weighing station where the source stays in one place. Matching the hood to the task is what makes the difference between an arm that gets used and an arm that gets pushed out of the way.

The package also included a direct drive exhaust fan with clockwise rotation and top-horizontal discharge, sized for the arms rather than for a whole-room system, plus a protective motor switch so the fan can be isolated safely for service and cannot be left running unnoticed. Because the fan was selected with the arms, the airflow at each hood is what the arms were designed for instead of whatever an oversized shared system happens to deliver.

Connectors were supplied to tie the arms into the duct run. The result is a compact, self-contained source capture system: wall mounted extraction arms at the bench, one fan, one switch, and no changes to the casework the lab already owned.

Advantage

There are three realistic ways to control aroma and solvent vapor at a flavor bench: build more enclosures, raise general room exhaust, or capture at the source. Enclosures cost floor space and separate the chemist from small scale hands-on work. Raising general room exhaust moves a very large volume of conditioned air to dilute a very small volume of vapor, and it still lets that vapor pass the chemist’s breathing zone on the way out.

Source capture is the efficient answer, and in a flavor lab it has a second payoff that safety alone does not describe: it protects the sensory baseline of the room. Pulling aromatics away at the point they are released is what keeps this morning’s citrus blend from influencing this afternoon’s evaluation.

Wall mounting was the right variant here because the benches sit against walls and the wall structure was available. Where benches sit in the middle of a room, ceiling mounted arms are usually the better answer, and where a capture point has to follow a moving job, a portable extractor is. Labs USA specifies all three, along with laboratory fume hoods and lab furniture, so the recommendation follows the room rather than a single product line.

Return on Investment

The first return is airflow. A source capture arm exhausts a modest, targeted volume. Solving the same problem with additional enclosures or a higher general exhaust rate means paying to heat, cool, and dehumidify a much larger volume of make-up air, every hour the building runs. In the Ohio Valley climate, with humid summers and cold winters, that operating cost compounds year over year.

The second is work that did not have to happen. The arms mounted to existing walls above existing benches. There was no casework demolition, no bench relocation, and no period where the lab was out of service for construction. For a development lab with active projects, keeping the room running is often worth more than the equipment itself.

The third is quality. Rework in a flavor lab is expensive in a way that does not show up on an equipment invoice: a batch evaluated against a contaminated room baseline has to be blended and evaluated again. Keeping carryover out of the room air reduces that risk directly.

Finally, these are serviceable assemblies. Hoods, joints, and dampers are replaced individually, so the lab maintains the system piece by piece rather than budgeting for a full replacement.

Serving Laboratories Across Hebron and Northern Kentucky

Zoom Essence’s laboratory is in Hebron, Kentucky, in the Cincinnati northern Kentucky corridor near the airport. Labs USA supplies laboratory ventilation and furniture to food, flavor, beverage, and materials laboratories across northern Kentucky and greater Cincinnati, including Florence, Erlanger, Covington, Newport, and the Ohio side of the river, and works nationwide on projects like this one.

The region has a dense cluster of food and flavor manufacturing, and the same request comes up repeatedly: a development lab has outgrown the ventilation it was built with, and there is no room to add enclosures. Source capture at the bench is usually the fastest way to close that gap, because it works inside the lab that already exists.