The conveyors are based on an aluminium conveyor beam with low friction slide rails guiding a plastic multi-flexing chain. Products to be conveyed travel directly on the conveyor, or on pallets/carriers. Products that are handled have a weight from a few grams up to 30 kg and up to 1400 kg using roller and belt conveyors. The chain design permits horizontal as well as vertical change of direction.

Automatically adjustable guiderails

With the automatic guide rail system (AGS), change-overs between products with different widths can be performed very quickly. The system can be used in areas where access for manual resetting is limited or non-existent. This means that conveyors for multi product manufacturing can be placed at ceiling height or in closed areas, which contributes to compact layouts.
Safety and the working environment for the operators are enhanced. Automatic resetting of the lines promotes small production batch sizes and increased line utilization.

The AGS solves a long-standing productivity bottleneck in conveyor lines. Line output will increase and the payback time of the investment may be less than a month if resetting is required 5 times per week.
The system makes efficient multi products manufacturing lines a reality as frequent product changes are commonplace in industry today. The core of the system is the electrically driven guiding units which control the position of the guide rails along the line. Up to 220 guiding units can be controlled from one cabinet and the system has a repetitive accuracy of less than +- 0.1 mm.
Compared to manual resetting, the new system eliminates sources of disturbances and enhances the stability of the product conveyed. The system is designed for dry and wet production environments, it suits a wide range of conveyor types and is available from stock.
The system, which consists of a number of guide rail support units along the conveyor, can be driven either pneumatically or manually with a hand wheel. Up to four parallel lanes can be handled by one system. In larger systems, several units may be connected to each other with shafts instead of driving each separate unit.