How Industry 4.0 boosts safety, productivity with piab material handling

Even workers in high heels can use piab's new piFLOW®p SMART safely.

piab is proud of its piFLOW®p SMART vacuum conveyor, the Changeover Champion for dry material handling, available through Firing Industries. One of this device’s advantages is its use of Industry 4.0. This system results in substantial improvements in productivity and safety for piab’s customers.

With Industry 4.0, users of the piab piFLOW®p SMART can even wear high heels on shop floors while transporting dry materials.

Next stage of industrial transformation

The piFLOW®p SMART from Firing Industries represents the next stage of industrial transformation to automated processing. Industry 4.0 has been on piab’s management agenda for a while, but the real world of manufacturing has yet to catch up with the company’s technological ambitions. About 50 per cent of piab’s vacuum-conveying business is generated from assisting customers with converting processes based on the manual handling of seeds, powders, granules, and other materials in containers into automatic processes based on conveying technology. Vacuum conveyors can transport dry material in powder or granule form, including dried egg, atomized metal, and headache pills.

Using machine learning, piFLOW®p SMART determines what kind of material it is handling after only a few cycles, then adjusts itself automatically to optimize the conveying task. Operators no longer have to readjust settings between different material batches; piFLOW®p SMART can do it with an unmatched level of accuracy.

In developing this tool, piab first moved the operator away from carrying material to different locations manually. Now, users do not even have to adjust the conveyor manually anymore – it self-adjusts. The final step is to make it both safe and feasible for even a user in high heels to transport dry materials at a secure distance from the production line; any operator can track the material flow on a touchscreen.

To get an idea of how the piFLOW®p SMART works, check out the videos below:

To learn more, contact Firing Industries’ application-sales engineers at ddubuc@firing.com or (877) 688-0974.

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