Drives for food conveyors chosen for reliability

A new conveyor system for yoghurt lines at the food giant Yoplait relies on 85 inverter and geared motor drives from Lenze.  With yoghurt production on three 8 hour shifts, perfect control is essential to achieve high process consistency and quality with such sensitive milk based products.  The Lenze smd inverters meet the requirement with proven reliability and features that guarantee minimum downtime.
The 85 smd inverters have power ratings of 0.37 and 0.75kW.  They are mounted in panels above the conveyors.  Both powers have the same compact footprint and the larger inverter is only 9mm deeper, allowing plenty of cabinet space around the drives so that no cooling fan is needed.  The geared motors are the Lenze type GKR which is a right-angle bevel design.  Unlike worm gears which have a similar configuration, the GKR gearboxes have an efficiency of 96% which will result in electricity cost savings of more than £3000 over a year for Yoplait.

The smd inverter is a proven product with high reliability and tens of thousands operating worldwide.  Nevertheless where the plant is in continuous production, the consequences of a failure must be considered.  Here the smd has a big advantage – a pluggable memory chip that holds all the parameters and settings of the drive.  In the unlikely event of failure the chip can be unplugged, the drive replaced and the original chip plugged back in.  The conveyor is then ready to run again in a repair process that takes only a few minutes without needing any programming knowledge.

In such cases where simple machinery operates as a critical part of a food making process, selection depends on minimising downtime.  Lenze provide high efficiency geared motors that are maintenance free for 16,000 hours.  Their smd inverters can be exchanged by unskilled personnel and without the need to plug in a laptop.  The memory chip can be exchanged in minutes.

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