Posted to News on 18th Mar 2009, 07:20
Yoplait conveyors use 85 Lenze inverters and geared motors
Lenze has supplied 85 smd inverters and GKR geared motors for a conveyor system in one of Yoplait's yoghurt production plants.
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 eight-hour shifts, tight 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 ensure minimum downtime. The 85 smd inverters, which are mounted in panels above the conveyors, have power ratings of 0.37 and 0.75kW. 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 that have a similar configuration, the GKR gearboxes have an efficiency of 96 per cent, which will result in electricity cost savings of more than 3000 over a year for Yoplait.
Lenze's smd inverter is a proven product with high reliability and tens of thousands of units 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 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 provides high-efficiency geared motors that are maintenance-free for 16,000 hours. The 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.
Follow the links for more information about smd inverters and GKR geared motors.
