I worked through an application the other day with a customer who had some metal plates with dimensions of 2 meters by 1 meter. The plates weighed about 25 lbs. each. The customer wanted to move these from a stack onto a roller table in order to position for water jet cutting. There is no easy way to grab these plates so the customer wanted to use vacuum technology to move them.

After taking into consideration the size and weight of the plate, I recommended (6) 2″ vacuum cups and (3) Model 80005M E-vac vacuum generators, (2) cups per vacuum generator.  The cups were arranged in two rows of 3 onto a suitable lifting frame. Having 6 vacuum cups was necessary due to the length of the product in order to provide stability during the lifting action.

The system works quite well and provides safe movement of the sheets which the customer used to move by hand.

This is an example of a typical vacuum cup application. If you have other applications that require vacuum, but maybe are not lifting or product placement applications, give us a call. We would be glad to discuss and see if we have something here that can help.

Neal Raker
Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com