KERS System
Palletizing of Pet Food Boxes
August 2, 2022
Palletizing of valve and open-mouth bags
November 7, 2022
KERS System:
The acronym KERS stands for Kinetic Energy Recovery System and you have most likely heard of it because of its use in F1 vehicles. The system is based on a simple electrodynamic principle: energy is used to stop a moving body, which is usually produced in the form of heat in the braking process. Thanks to KERS, this energy, instead of being dissipated, is converted back into electrical energy and reused for the other motors in the car itself.
Europack and KERS System:
Europack palletising systems use the same principle: in a Winner robot there are a total of 4 servomotors, which produce electrical energy during deceleration. Normally this energy would be dissipated through the use of braking resistors connected to the power drives of each motor. Due to the kinematics of the Winner Robot, in particular the fact that when the vertical axis decelerates, the other axes are in the acceleration phase and vice versa, we have created a system where the 4 drives are electrically interconnected and exchange the energy generated in the braking phases, making it available to the drives that require it.
Savings in terms of energy consumption:
Thanks to a study carried out by an engineering specialist in Vicenza, Italy, we are able to calculate precisely what the advantages are in terms of energy consumption, and therefore price, of our palletisers compared to industrial robots.
The study was conducted on 3 workstations - Winner 500 GREEN, Winner 500 ER, ABB Robot - which performed the same movement with the same load monitored for 300 seconds.
As can be seen from the graph, given the regularity of the discharge, the results are quite clear: a system with brushless motors and KERS system consumes 70% less than a standard industrial robot. Specifically, we are talking about a consumption of 0.375 Kwh for a Winner Green system compared to around 1.27 Kwh for a standard robot.
Based on the current costs of electricity in Italy (October 2022), on average we pay 0.501 € per Kwh (source), we can calculate the savings: using a palletiser 8 hours a day for 300 working days per year we arrive at a saving of approximately 1000 € (1.27*0.501*8*300 - 0.375*0.501*8*300).
Want to know more about Europack palletisers and the KERS system? Contact us!
