#Product Trends
Retrofit your industrial machine with energy-efficient, easy-to-implement and programmable electric actuators
In recent years, a growing trend has been observed for converting a car to an electric vehicle with a lightweight electric motor. What about your industrial machines? Have you already thought about the transition toward an electric solution?
Today, there are more than 300,000 facilities throughout Europe running production machines. Despite the technological advancement and growing trends toward electrification and digitalization, the majority of this machinery ecosystem is using pneumatic actuators, which is the standard technology since approximately the 1920s.
Each of these actuators might run on automatic machines 24 hours a day. A typical pneumatic actuator with a cylinder size of 25 mm might be responsible for a significant amount of CO2 emissions of 1,253 kg per year, which is as much as a recent passenger car’s emissions (for more details, please look at the references at the end of the page).
At KOMP-ACT, we estimated that the European manufacturing industry might be generating more than 50 million tons of CO2 per year as well as one billion euros of energy consumption loss. These energy inefficiencies can be mostly explained by leakages caused by pneumatic technologies.
Thus, the price of a pneumatic actuator coupled with the costs of all the related accessories required for generating and conveying the compressed air can reach up to € 500. On top of that, one has to consider the operational and maintenance costs of such frequent leakages on site. Last but not least, due to its energy-consuming infrastructure, a typical application of a standard pneumatic actuator is also generating energy costs up to € 543 per year as described in the example at the bottom of the page.
By comparison, KOMP-ACT’s KLA-40-040-0F3-2 electric actuator with the same features than a standard pneumatic actuator (i.e. 40-mm stroke length and 91% running time) generates 120 kg of CO2 emissions (as opposed to 1,253 kg), can reach a frequency up to two times higher and only represents € 52 of energy costs per year.
While pneumatic technologies require a complex initial infrastructure likely to cause an important number of leakages, KOMP-ACT designs and manufactures plug-and-play electric motion technologies, which are easy to implement on an existing machine. KOMP-ACT’s complete electric solution – including linear actuators, an electronic controller and a web-based end-user interface – requires neither any additional accessories (e.g. heat sink, fans for air cooling or liquid cooling) nor software installation. By simply connecting the electronic controller to a laptop with the help of a USB cable, a machine owner or manufacturer can easily set up an actuator’s settings such as its stroke length, transfer time or cycling rate to reach the machine’s required performance. Performance levels are kept stable over the entire actuator lifespan thanks to an intelligent control algorithm, which compensates the impact of external factors on an actuator’s functioning (e.g. dust accumulation caused by packing machines).
KOMP-ACT's electric actuators are synchronous motors, which use magnets to directly move the slider without the need for mechanical elements such as ball screws, lead screws, etc.
Thanks to its iron-core tubular motor technology, this electric motion device provides a faster response time (less than 1 ms), a higher dynamic rate (up to 200 cycles/min) and a shorter transfer time (less than 40 ms) than conventional iron-less tubular motors.
Besides, up to 95% of the energy costs associated to pneumatics can be cut with the adoption of electric actuators. Indeed, KOMP-ACT’s electric actuators can reach up to 20 million cycles, which represents a greater lifespan than regular pneumatic actuators.
Thanks to its energy-efficient, easy-to-implement and programmable motion devices, KOMP-ACT aims at driving the transition toward a sustainable electric industry from ground to sky accessible to all and available in an affordable price range from € 490 to € 790.
Tailor-made actuators are also available on request.
Contact us to divide your consumption of electrical energy and CO2 emission level by 10 with KOMP-ACT’s electrical solution!
https://www.komp-act.com/contact/
References:
A typical application of packaging machines shows that a pneumatic cylinder with the following characteristics:
- having a cylinder of 25 mm, a stroke of 40 mm, a frequency of 100 cycles/min and a minimum transfer time of 100 ms;
- and running 91% of its time (8000 hours/year).
can reach up to:
- an average energy consumption: 4,175 kWh/year
- an average CO2 emission level: 1,253 kg/year
- average energy costs: 543 €/year (based on the reference European market price in the industry of 0.13 ct/kWh)
These estimations have been made considering 0.3 kg CO2/kWh in EU.
A passenger car in Europe consumes on average only 1.3 ton of CO2/year for 10’000 km/year with the actual target of 130 grams of CO2 per km. Therefore, a small size pneumatic cylinder emits as much CO2 than a recent passenger car.
