Balancing act between high availability and cost-saving design
Madrid/E. BDL, now part of the Interroll Group, supplied a large batch of circa 1,800 drum motors for the check-in counters and special baggage conveyor system at the new terminal of Barajas Airport in Madrid. There has been no word from them since. There were no faulty parts. No replacement motors had to be supplied. A sad state of affairs, given that manufacturers often rely on the after-sales business of supplying replacement parts.
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A good two years ago, BDL supplied a large batch of circa 1,800 drum motors for the check-in counters and special baggage conveyor system at the new terminal of Barajas Airport in
Madrid. There has been no word from them since. There were no faulty parts. No replacement motors had to be supplied. A sad state of affairs, given that manufacturers often rely
on the after-sales business of supplying replacement parts. But that is not the philosophy of the BDL Maschinenbaugesellschaft, which is now part of the Interroll Group.
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In the aviation industry, high availability is crucial - both in the air and for logistics services on the ground. With departures and arrivals occurring minute by minute and
hundreds of baggage items per aircraft, any breakdown of the conveyor system can lead to substantial delays in air traffic flows. This means that all the critical elements have to
meet extremely high standards. Yet costs cannot be allowed to escalate. This calls for a highly available yet cost-saving, lightweight form of construction. The ETL conveyor
system developed by FKI Logistex ticks all these boxes. It is used for transporting the kind of plastic totes that are required to convey and sort non-standard, unstable baggage
like backpacks and holdalls. Drum motors are particularly suitable for driving lightweight conveyor segments, since it too is "reduced to the max" - with all drive
components like motor, casing and conveyor rollers combined into one unit that requires no complicated, flange-mounted lateral components. Nor is any mechanical tension required
to hold the belts in place.
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 | | The rigorous selection process of FKI Logistex
As the ETL conveyor system of FKI has to perform an extremely high number of sequential starts and stops per day and is required to offer long-term availability for more than 10
years, the system developers looked for motors that would withstand extremely high demands; they also carried out comprehensive market research. Ultimately this led to the
selection of belt drives produced by BDL. BDL was the only manufacturer able not only to deliver specified product lifetime data but also to supply specific and convincing
lifetime figures at the time.
To do so, the Wassenberg drum motor specialists developed a comprehensive calculation program that allowed all relevant factors and ratios to be calculated against various
environmental parameters. This calculation system has since been used for many other drum motor sales in order to give customers reliable statements about the expected
availability of a certain drum motor deployed in a specific application. However, FKI Logistex did not stop there. The use of the dum motors was also simulated on a test bench to
check the accuracy of the calculations. The result was that the simulation clearly exceeded the specified lifetime of the motor.
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 | | At least 13 years of service life
At Madrid Airport, it has been calculated that the motors used, with 15 expected starts and stops per minute and a top speed of 0.5m/s to 1m/s (98 fpm to 196 fpm), will have a
service life of 13 to 16 years. BDL drum motors have been performing at this level since their installation without requiring any maintenance and/or servicing work. All of this
has occurred without a single motor break-down and the associated need for replacement parts. "We don't even include them in our regular maintenance checks," says
George Edward Kunhardt, the Maintenance Manager for FKI Logistex in Spain.
Contact: Anders Staf Hansen, Global Product Manager Interroll Drum Motors, +45 40 97 11 85, a.hansen@interroll.com |
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