Industrial Automation and Motion Control Blog | The Knotts Company

Industry: Food Packaging

This post is brought to you by Precision Technology

Q: Why Electro-Mechanical?

A: IT'S PRECISE, POWERFUL AND CLEAN.

Evolution of Technology

All industries are taking a critical look at the way they use motion control systems in their equipment. Where hydraulics once dominated, equipment is now increasingly utilizing electro-mechanical actuators for a large number of tasks for which they previously would not have been considered. Electro-mechanical actuators provide more precise and reliable motion, and integrate easily with modern PLCs and computers. From a complete system perspective, they are smaller, lighter, and cleaner than their hydraulic counterparts.

This post brought to you by Norgren

Many years of valuable experience in the energy sector has resulted in the development of products specifically designed to meet the exacting needs of this industry. On wellhead and platform installations it is of prime importance that the compressed air or gas supply is free from contamination. Norgren achieves this with its proven range of stainless steel air and gas preparation products.

Miniature rotary vane pumps are chosen wherever lowest pulsation and/or compact size in combination with high flow at lower pressure/vacuum is needed. Applications are various and can be found in medical, environmental and industrial applications, such as prevention of DVT (deep vein thrombosis) with a portable device, portable particle counters or marking and coding printers.

This post brought to you by Humphrey Products.

In the pneumatic valve world, we often oversize valves for applications. Many times we size the valve strictly off of the port size that the customer wants to use, which can make the valve significantly higher in flow than is needed. This is not generally a problem in industrial applications as actuators can easily be slowed down using flow controls and the oversize situation will never be noticed.

 This post brought to you by Dorner.

Dorner’s SmartFlex® conveyors are designed and shipped to keep things simple!  Each conveyor is completely assembled and tested at Dorner.  It is then partially disassembled into sub-assemblies for shipping.  This ensures that set-up is fast and easy once your conveyor arrives. 

This post brought to you by WAGO.

Kallfass Verpackungsmaschinen GmbH has been developing packaging machines for more than 40 years now and sells these machines on international markets.

There are Kallfass shrink-wrap systems for manual, partially-automated, and fully-automated shrink wrapping. The most important features of Kallfass systems: flexible deployment possibilities, short changeover times, minimized fill usage, low cost of ownership, and maximum availability of the packaging system so that productivity is not slowed down or stopped at the end of the production line. Kallfass shrink-wrap packaging machines are used in many industries: printing and paper, contract packaging and fulfillment, the food and beverage industries, the wood and furniture industries and more.

This post brought to you by Proportion Air.

Losing Steam - Figuratively and Literally

Cooking on a mass scale requires no small amount of precise engineering.

A corn tortilla manufacturer was having a problem controlling temperature with the saturated steam used to heat the cooking kettles for the corn. The manufacturer came to Proportion-Air seeking a solution.

This post brought to you by Norgren.

NEW VALVE PROVIDES ULTIMATE IN FREEZE PROTECTION

 CUSTOMER CHALLENGE

Various systems on a passenger train require a water supply, from the buffet car to the carriage toilets. When a train is not in service (overnight), water left in the system can freeze, either damaging the system or preventing the train from being started. Components have been developed over the years to automatically drain the water when the train is out of service, if the temperature falls towards zero. Many of these systems are unreliable.