SHOW ORGANIZERS estimate 60,000 visitors attended CeMat, the “intralogistics showcase,” held this spring in Hannover, Germany. The 1,100 exhibitors at the show offered a treasure trove of new ideas and unique solutions to visitors' materials handling challenges.

SSI Schaefer's exhibit, for example, proved to be a rich source of fresh ideas on high-density automated storage systems.

Rob Schmit, managing director of the company's Automation & Systems Division, walked Modern through the company's displays, focusing on details that might appear foreign to Americans. Many might have seen high-density storage with movable aisles in their local library, for example, but in a cold storage warehouse?

“Super dense storage is growing in popularity everywhere else but in the States,” Schmit said. “I don't get it. Think about the green impact. You can get 30% more pallets into a deep freeze warehouse using the same cube.”

The system, he says, can open up storage aisles as needed—a solution that works well in deep freezes, which usually have limited throughput and a low number of SKUs.

At the Beumer exhibit, Hans-Jurgen Thommes, head of marketing, spoke of the smartening of sortation. demonstrated this concept in the form of a belt tray sorter that not only sorts but also detects the type of product it is conveying and sends it to the appropriate destination.

CeMat's many lift truck exhibits provided some fresh thinking on alternative energy.

Linde Material Handling, for example, introduced a lift truck with a direct-injection hydrogen combustion engine.

The 3-ton-capacity vehicle produces no emissions. Its pressure pump blows hydrogen directly into the engine's combustion chamber, enabling the fuel to burn efficiently while helping the vehicle achieve high torques at low rotational speeds.

A company spokesperson said hydrogen vehicles will probably be introduced in the industrial truck sector before the automotive industry, but realistically, not much before 2015. Until then, Linde will continue to do field tests.

At the Jungheinrich exhibit, product specialist Michael v. Forstner acknowledged that hydrogen fuel cells have been capturing customers' imaginations, but he doesn't believe the technology represents his industry's future.

“They're very expensive and so much energy goes into the production of hydrogen,” he said. “We see the technology of the future as lithium ion cells.”

Lithium batteries are more expensive than standard batteries, he said, but they last twice as long.