Conveying made easy with Piab’s piFLOW®p SMART Conveying Cycle Optimizer (CCO)

Wouldn’t conveying more material at the same time, with less requirements on operator skills and saving on energy costs sound great? If so, check out Piab’s newest edition to its premium conveyor series.

The semi-automated piFLOW®p SMART CCO vacuum conveyor focuses on the needs of continuous production and allows for pick-up of material from, for instance, a bag dump station or directly from a barrel using a feed nozzle or pipe.

Fewer cycles are needed to convey a certain product to packaging, sieving, milling, or dosing. The piFLOW®p SMART CCO optimizes the process by maximizing the use of the system capacity with each new conveying cycle.

The key to optimal batch volume

Thanks to its dual sensor solution, the piFLOW®p SMART CCO utilizes the entire conveyor batch volume in every cycle. Only one parameter needs to be set by the operator, i.e. that of the air carrying valve. All other settings are adapted accordingly by the conveyor itself.

The top sensor measures the quantity in the conveyor and stops the filling cycle once it reaches the maximum level. The bottom sensor closes the bottom lid as soon as the conveyor body is empty, resulting in an immediate restart of the conveying process.

Inherent system protection

The top sensor of the piFLOW®p SMART CCO also acts as material overfill protection. By shutting down the conveying cycle before the material reaches the filter, filter breakage is nearly eliminated reducing downtime and replacement cost.

During the discharge phase of the conveying cycle, a shock of compressed air cleans the filter. This further contributes to a long filter lifetime. Depending on the material conveyed, the system can be set to perform 1 to 5 filter shocks. At the same time an air channel blow cleans the sensor heads by pulses of compressed air until the sensors are un-triggered.

As easy to use as a screw conveyor

Even a less skilled operator can start the piFLOW®p SMART CCO as it is almost as easy and intuitive as starting e.g. a screw conveyor. This is because the operator only needs to set the carrying air, as the piFLOW®p SMART CCO automatically adjusts the suction and discharge times to the material flow – thereby relieving the operator from controlling three parameters and spending several cycles on fine-tuning the process to improve the performance.

For full flexibility, the suction and discharge times can also be set manually. In this case the operator can save material specific settings and invoke them again the next time the material is conveyed.

All settings are done at the electrical control unit and visualized through a user-friendly human machine interface.

Further features of the piFLOW®p SMART Conveying Cycle Optimizer (CCO):

• Conveyor external level sensors to measure the material quantity in the equipment feeding the conveyor or being fed by the conveyor
• Upgradable to the full auto-tuning system within 10 minutes by adding a feed adapter and air carrying unit
• Made of acid resistant stainless steel, type ASTM 316L
• FDA, EC 1935/2004 and EU 10/2011 compliant

piFLOW®p SMART Conveying Cycle Optimizer (CCO) - handout (pdf)

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