Compressed Air Best Practices - September 2008 - (Page 56) | 09/08 Compressed Air Industry FOOD PACKAGING & PROCESSING | REAL WORLD BEST PRACTICES UTILIZING VENTURI VACUUM GENERATORS Automatic Controls: Anytime you have to run the vacuum generator, it uses compressed air. Conversely, once the full vacuum is reached, it is very energy efficient to shut off the airline to the vacuum and, with proper valving, hold the vacuum without using any air. Some porous materials will of course not allow this; however, many, many materials do. Many times these controls are through a PLC software program supplied by the machine manufacturer. On a recent plant audit, a set of six palletizers at the end of packaging lines were reviewed. Each palletizer has a robotic arm with six suction cups and two Venturi vacuum generators, both running, drawing six scfm each at 60 psig. The software program had the robotic arm pickup the slip sheet from the side and hold until the signal from the pallet activated and then the slip sheet was then set down and released. The air was then shut off. The robotic arm then went immediately to the stack and picked up another slip sheet and held it until the next release signal. The result of this was an average taken over an hour of holding and movement with the air on of 52 seconds and an hourly average of 9.3 seconds of movement with the air off with an average cycle time of 61.3 seconds. 56 www.airbestpractices.com http://www.airbestpractices.com
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