Industry leader called upon in local solution design
Fourth Quarter 2004
Pneumatic systems & components
Speed, accuracy and durability were the main selection factors when Protech Engineering from Port Elizabeth was approached by BKB to design a system that would produce large volumes of metal hooks for use on wool bales. With only a month to study the application requirements, the system integrator for Festo managed to assemble a unique solution that has now produced over 57 million hooks at about 2 hooks per second.
Lying at the heart of the solution is the pneumatic Festo Strip Feeder unit specialised in feeding long, rolled material into a process at a predetermined rate. Offering high accuracy in terms of material lengths and feeding speed, this product has significant benefits in speeding up production, eliminating errors and allowing unsupervised operation. In this case, the Strip Feeder delivers rolls of wire into a press with a tolerance between 20 and 50 mm, where the wire is cut and formed into hooks. The self-contained, heavy-duty feed units are well suited to harsh industrial environments.
With Festo offering a complete range of pneumatic components and accessories, the company's ability to be a single-source resource for automation projects meant that, in addition to technical assistance with design and specifications, it also supplied the pneumatically actuated valves for the project, types MFH and MLC, as well as an FC20 Compact Programmable Logic Controller.
"Together with the client, we are looking into a further upgrade of their production facilities, in which case I will certainly rely on Festo again. Apart from the quality of their products, nobody offers me the same level of spares and service support," concludes Protech Engineering director, Johan Wolmarans.
For more information contact Nico Landman, Festo, Port Elizabeth, +27 (0) 41 453 2087, [email protected], www.festo.com
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