One of the most persistent issues that customers talk about in the material handling market is conveyor jams. The lost productivity, damage to equipment, and unnecessary shutdowns due to false conveyor jams, all add up. Additionally, when products get stuck in conveyor jams, they can incur damage from repeated collisions, so jams need to be identified immediately and resolved as soon as possible. Turck Banner has listened to its customers and developed a simple yet effective solution to solve the issues related to conveyor jams.
The Turck Banner Q5X Jam Detection Sensor is a plug-and-play solution that immediately alerts operators whenever a physical jam occurs. They can then clear the jam and get the line moving again with minimal interruption. This helps reduce overall downtime significantly, particularly for conveyor systems featuring curves, gravity-fed spirals, and other potential bottlenecks.
Traditionally, jam detection on conveyors incorporates a photoelectric sensor beam that products interrupt as they move forward through the system. When one item completely passes the sensor beam, there should be a gap before the next item interrupts it, and these regularly recurring gaps are used to identify individual items and maintain proper automation speed.
By contrast, the Q5X Jam Detection Sensor does not rely on gap identification. Instead, it extends the functionality of Turck Banner’s existing dual-mode technology with a built-in jam algorithm. This enables the sensor to detect changes in signal strength and distance between the face of the sensor and the products. With this approach, the sensor can easily detect when items are freely flowing. This is a much more accurate method of detecting conveyor jams when they occur.
A false jam occurs when a sensing system detects a conveyor jam when in fact no jam is actually present. For example, a typical sensor might incorrectly identify a jam in a production line if two packages that are freely moving through the system are simply too close together for a visual gap between them to be registered. These false jams cause lost productivity due to unnecessary stopping of lines, causing downstream processes to be starved for work, and wasted time when maintenance is forced to check on problems that do not exist. The Q5X Jam Detection Sensor drastically reduces false jams − in some instances reducing them by 80 to 90%.
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