One of our best and oldest customers recently asked Power Torque to review their manufacturing process. The problem was that the conveyor carrying their finished product would start too suddenly, and the product would occasionally fall off of the skids, the conveyor would have to shut down, and each 300 pound piece would have to be reloaded by hand, stopping production for hours.

Our customer was somewhat unsure of any solution, they had been told in the past that electric soft starts would be the way to go. They purchased them, they failed and operated erratically.  The same thing happened with A.C. inverters. They wanted to fix their problem, but they did not want to waste any more money and time on something that would not work.

After viewing the application, we realized that there is a very high friction start, but once the load was moving, the required horsepower to run the load decreased by 80 percent. This conveyor uses a 20 horsepower motor with multiple reductions. The total load on the conveyor is approximately 25,000 pounds, and it cycles on and off one time per minute.

Realizing that electric soft starts are mainly designed for high inertia loads where the running horsepower does not decrease abruptly, we sized a NEXEN AIR CLUTCH that can start this type of high friction load with a soft start, and still dissipate the heat that builds up in a cycling application.

The environment where this unit is mounted is extremely harsh; not only is the unit mounted outdoors, but is located just outside of a blast furnace, where a lot of dust and slag falls directly onto the unit.

Horton / Nexen has been a major line for Power Torque for more than 35 years, and our experience with these units has shown that they can operate in this type of condition very well. So our customer took our recommendation, bought and installed the unit, and has used it 24 hours a day without a single failure. Our customer is very pleased, which makes us very pleased as well. Let our experience work for you and your company.