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Innovative clean room cranes for the pharmaceutical industry

ALTMANN holds a leading position in developing clean room cranes – particularly for the pharmaceutical industry. The use of a clean room crane reduces the risk of contamination in production significantly. The electric belt hoist used in our ALTMANN clean room cranes is an essential feature that offers numerous advantages.

Perfect choice of material. No wear. For your production under clean room conditions.

It is important, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, to guarantee safe, sterile production and to make sure that the product quality is not impaired by airborne contaminations. This could have fatal consequences in the case of medicine and pharmaceuticals, depending on the degree of contamination.

All components of our clean room cranes have been optimized for clean-room capability. We ensure that your products can be manufactured in the highest possible quality while increasing your production efficiency. Extra effort for conversion, servicing and maintenance becomes unnecessary thanks to a clean room crane.

 

ALTMANN clean room cranes for the pharmaceutical industry excel in the following:

  • Use of maintenance- and lubricant-free load belts instead of cables or chains
  • Closed drives without fans
  • Easy-to-clean, smooth surfaces
  • Completely sealed assemblies
  • Low-wear friction surfaces (e. g. drive wheel treads)
  • Long service life
  • High-precision positioning due to low natural vibration
  • Frequency-controlled drives as a standard
  • Low installation height

For more than 20 years, we have been holding a leading position in the development of clean room cranes. We are known for facing challenges in design and manufacturing of clean room cranes as well as for constantly setting new standards. Our clean room cranes are equipped with electric belt hoists that have been particularly designed for production under clean room conditions. Contact us now so we can successfully implement your requests.

We offer the following additional options for clean room cranes:

  • Design completely in stainless steel, available in various grades (e. g. 1.4301, 1.4571 etc.)
  • Electronic load monitor for recording operating data (remaining service life, hours of operation, number of hoisting cycles, number of overload shutdowns etc.)                      
  • Digital load display                       
  • Tandem operation for the simultaneous control of several crane systems
  • Synchronisation of several crane axes with millimetre precision (hoists, trolley and crane carriages)
  • Wireless communication for data exchange with neighbouring clean room cranes or higher-level process control systems                  
  • Distance monitoring of neighbouring clean room cranes            
  • Avoidance controls for permanently installed obstacles in the clean room working area  
  • Semi-automatic and fully automatic controls, e. g. for positioning and much more.

Clean room cranes consist of a number of special components, some of which have found their way into other industrial cranes. We have for example implemented an automatic crane system that can reach a speed of 160 m/min at an acceleration of 1 m/s² due to the use of special wheels from clean room cranes. For such systems, speeds of around 40 m/min and accelerations of around 0.2 m/s² are typical. With the aid of the special wheels normally used in clean room cranes, such speed and acceleration increases can even be achieved without rack-and-pinion drives and other kinds of non-slip drives.

For production in clean rooms, minimising the negative effects of airborne particles on production is essential. Our high-performance electric belt hoist was originally developed for clean rooms and for installation in clean room cranes. Our belt hoist specially designed for use in clean rooms is already in the fourth generation and available with all configurations. It excels with the following characteristics:

  • Use of maintenance- and lubricant-free load belts instead of cables or chains
  • Extremely low natural vibration for high-precision positioning of loads to be lifted
  • No polygon effect and no lateral hook travel when lifting or lowering
  • High resistance to wear
  • Smooth surfaces for easy cleaning
  • Low-wear material combinations on friction surfaces (e. g. drive wheel treads) prevent formation of electrically conductive abrasion products
  • Extremely low noise emissions
  • Load hook made of stainless steel or with hard-chrome plating, it requested

The unbeatable advantages of the electric belt hoist used in clean rooms and clean room cranes have led to their use for production in other sectors.

Every particle released from a crane falls downward due to gravitational force. Both wear and particles disturb your production and impair the high quality of your product. The frequently installed facility for air exchange circulates air from the ceiling downward to a raised floor or to suction openings at the edge of the floor, inevitably bringing every particle down onto your products. Deleterious effects often become apparent only during final tests at the end of the production process. In even worse cases, the effects only appear once the customer has already used your product. This results in expensive recall actions and high repair costs. Given the high standards of your products, these costs are usually higher than the purchase price of a clean room crane.

The top priority during the development of clean room cranes is to avoid sources of particle emission, a requirement that standard cranes fail to satisfy in any respect. Many parts of such cranes emit particles continuously, and material combinations unsuitable for clean-room environments are a constant cause of wear.

Particle emission of a non-clean room suitable crane due to:Wear on the running wheels

  • Wear on the running wheels
  • Wear on energy supply systems
  • Outgassing of solvents on painted surfaces
  • Outgassing from lubricants where lubricated parts such as cables and bearings are exposed          
  • Grit from cable or chain drives
  • Particles expelled from fans in the drives

We avoid all this with our clean room cranes and also ensure that your productivity does not just plateau at a high level but instead increases significantly.