The machine is intended to be feed by hand from a holding trough to a conveyor which moves the fish through a measuring system and autonomously vaccinates the fish, before exiting the system into a recovery tank, this happens at a rate of 1 fish per second in the full system. The system is intended for use in highly testing/ corrosive environments, namely fish farms which have fresh and sea water in them, thus non-corrosive components were required. This challenge was made simpler using igus products. The machine had to be reliable and easy of clean, due to cross contamination laws between farms in Scotland, Norway, and many other countries. Automating a complex process, usually done by hand, required the many iterations of the design and prototypes. Igus has allowed us to create a durable, low maintenance semi-autonomous fish vaccinating machine.

The machine is intended to be moved between fish farm sites and must be durable to survive transit as well as the corrosive conditions on site. Choosing plastics suitably resistant to Fresh water, salt water and cleaning chemicals, we were able to select design desirable to our application without giving up preferred design options.
Requirements:
Long life, low maintenance, corrosion free, low water and chemical absorption.
Alternatives:
Tradition PTFE coated slider bearings and standard sealed bearings. The SLW rail allowed us to spec the entire load and required speeds, to work with igus to decide on the most suitable plastics and rail materials for our purpose and a predicted life time for components. Giving us confidence that our machinery will not fail in the field. Additional photos and video to be sent to robert day rday@igus.net

The Drylin SLW rail provided a pre-assembled solution that we knew would work and integrate with the rest of our system, allowing us to focus our effort on more time-consuming areas like fish measurement. Being light weight and Anti corrosive the system meant we could leave parts exposed that would traditionally have been covered. Due to the Fish farming industries strict cleaning requirements, the Drylin bearings have allowed us to design simpler machines with less complex encasings that would often be required to house traditional lubricated bearings and sliding options, to protect lubrication and corrosive elements. An unexpected benefit has been the low noise of the machine when running.
Solutions:
Flanged bearings and Drylin SLW rails with Pillow blocks. The device has proven to be reliable with consistent, reproducible results and when paired with our motors we get a fine position control.

drylin® Antriebsachsen

3-6 Monate

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