Clear vision of door performance requirements for lens maker

1st February 2017
Posted By : Anna Flockett
Clear vision of door performance requirements for lens maker

 

To ensure there was minimum disruption to production, the engineers at sara LBS fitted a new Sprint Indupart RUN door, to replace an aging access door at a busy contact lens manufacturer, in one day over the Christmas shut down.

The manufacture of soft contact lenses and related products is a global business. Production operations must be carried out in very clean conditions, so automated high speed doors are used to separate manufacturing and materials handling functions. Such doors are opened and closed constantly during the working day, so must be kept in good working order. When older doors became unreliable, it is important to address the situation promptly.

Such was the situation when Nick Cox of sara LBS was contacted by the lens manufacturer. He explained the requirements: “The door opening is relatively small, being 1,760mm wide and 1,600mm high. Through it pallets containing items such as bottle for contact lens fluids are passed by forklifts trucks, for collection by production personnel. This happens many times each day, so the door opens and closes frequently. The old door was becoming unreliable with age and clear it would have to replace it before the situation became critical.”

sara LBS’s range of doors includes industrial doors, roller shutter doors, high speed doors, curtain doors, transparent doors and thermally insulated doors. Nick Cox said: “Customer requirements are incredibly varied, hence all our different door options.”

He continued: “At the lens factory, the obvious need was for a fast acting door that could meet the requirement for frequent opening and closing. Working on from this idea we thought that if we could find a lightweight solution that required relatively little energy to open and close, this would add up to a significant cost saving over a busy working week. However, we also had to ensure reliability, so a robust door design would be required.

“We also knew that it was inevitable that from time to time the door would take a bump from a fork lift truck, a thought that led us to suggest a door from our Sprint Indupart RUN range, in which the door curtain has ‘cogged’ side edges, which allow the curtain to come away from the guides rails in the event of an impact, to prevent damage (and also reduce the risk of injury to personnel). The curtain automatically rethreads itself into the guide rails when it next opens.”

In fact the Sprint RUN range has many other features that seemed tailor-made for this particular manufacturer. Its motor is inverter controlled, which means the curtain door can accelerate up speeds of up to 2.5m/s yet decelerate quickly to a safe and controlled stop. Thanks to the compact design of its frame and canopy the door is ideally suited to applications with restricted side room or headroom.

sara LBS is able to design and install customised doors which fit each project’s specific dimensional requirements and technical needs. It can even supply the doors in a range of colours. The Sprint range is tested during manufacture to a high standard so has a proven reputation for reliability, even in demanding high use applications.

Cox again: Our Sprint doors were revolutionary when they were introduced and have, justifiably, gone on to become so popular that they are seen as something of an industry standard.

“For the lens company sorting out all the design details for the new door was fairly quick. The next issue was to identify an installation date that would cause minimal disruption to the normal production routine of the site.

“Because it was late in the year the shut down between Christmas and New Year was imminent and we identified 29th December as the best date. It normally take just one day to install a Sprint door, but the 29th gave us the luxury of being able to spill over to the next day if there were any problems such as delayed access to the site or abominable weather. Fortunately everything went exactly to plan and our installation team were home in plenty of time to see in the New Year.”


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