A straight-forward approach to twisted conveyor applications

I know ProMat was over a few weeks ago, but I’m still playing catch up and revisiting a few companies I met for the first time and products that caught my attention.

One of those is Denipro, a Swiss manufacturer of conveyor technology components that made its North American debut at NA 2010. What caught my eye was a display touting Denipro’s friction reduction technology for linear applications – a fancy way of saying technology that allows you to move heavy things with less effort. At the booth, Denipro had a partial pallet of Coke that weighed about 600 pounds on a section of the company’s conveyor that you could move with just a push.

So who is Denipro? Ferag AG, the company’s parent company, provides conveyor and processing technology to the print media industry, according to Walter Wild, the senior vice president here in North America. “We make completely automated systems for everything between the printing press and the truck,” says Wild. Denipro is Ferag’s main supplier. “As the newspaper industry has slowed, we began to look at what products might be suitable outside the newspaper industry.”

While Denipro is promoting a handful of products in North America, including a spiral conveyor for vertical conveying and plate chain conveyor, the element they share in common is an emphasis on technology that reduces friction by up to 60%. “If you have a mat top conveyor belt and you want a curve, you traditionally put a Teflon strip on the inside of the curve to hold the conveyor in place,” Wild says. “That puts a drag on the conveyor.” Instead, Denipro uses a flat roller bearing – something it calls rolling friction – to serve the same purpose but with less friction. “That allows you to design a conveyor system that runs faster, with more curves and fewer drives,” says Wild.

Denipro is not targeting specific industries. Rather, the company is targeting applications. “We are not going after the simple, straight conveyor application,” says Wild. “But, if you have a difficult application, with straight sections, curves or conveyor that serves multiple levels, that’s when we come into play.”