Now more than ever, energy consumption is the center of attention for industries. Among those energies, compressed air is the most expensive to produce. To support our customers on their search for savings, Sepro offers a simple solution to drastically reduce the compressed air consumption. Where vacuum was generated continuously in the past, using compressed air all the time, the Sepro function ECO Air will now monitor the vacuum levels and activate the vacuum generation only when required.
These seconds per cycle without solicitation are as much savings on the electricity bill. When used with the right equipment, the function can reduce the effective compressed air demands by up to 85%.
The function is available on our S5/5X robots, 5DA and MI ranges but also on our new Success Line. It is compatible with our 3 control command levels (Touch 2, Visual 2, Visual 3). Because the function needs to know the vacuum levels, it also requires the option “Smart Digital Vacuum switch”.
How does it work?
Vacuum generators embedded on Sepro robots allowing ECO Air function are equipped with a check valve. When Sepro Visual detects that the expected vacuum level in the circuit to grip the parts is reached, the circuit is closed with the check valve and the vacuum is “trapped” in the circuit.
Because there is most likely to be leakage in the global system, vacuum level is slowly reducing, down until a threshold where the robot will simply regenate vacuum to restore the higher vacuum level while still securing the part. The less leakage there is in the system (air fittings, end of arm tool, “flat surface” to grip on, the better ECO Air function will work and therefore the bigger the economy.
Your assistant for wear monitoring
In addition to generating some savings, the ECO Air function will also help you oversee and detects some wears or degradations in your gripping systems. By setting reference values at the introduction of a new production, you will be able to monitor the evolution of savings due to ECO Air. A variation in these values will most likely indicate that a cup is deteriorated, a leakage has appeared, etc.
