The Bielefeld-based company Böllhoff offers its customers system solutions – and realises them with the support of KEB Automation. KEB’s drive technology have proven to be the right choice, particularly in the area of servo technology. Not least because the drive controllers lead to cost savings and require noticeably less space in the control cabinet.
High availability and process reliability, cost-optimised systems and the smallest possible space requirement in production – these are all challenges that the Böllhoff Group faces. The family-owned company based in Bielefeld was founded in 1877 and offers solutions for connection and assembly technology as well as logistics. For example, Böllhoff is in demand in the automotive industry – for example with the corresponding suppliers – or to some extent in the aerospace sector. For customers in these and other industries, Böllhoff supplies, among other things, processing and riveting elements.
With “RIVSET”, for example, Böllhoff offers a self-pierce riveting system that creates mechanical, high-strength connections of identical or combined materials. In the past, this was mainly based on a hydraulic drive. However, this also meant that the hydraulic hoses had to be routed over the robot – not advantageous for maintenance and difficult when it comes to locating faults within the hydraulics.
Air conditioner no longer necessary
Servo technology and the matching drive solutions from KEB Automation proved to be much more practical and reliable in this context. “We use KEB inverters in our controls to drive servo motors that we need in our processing systems,” says Jörg Münstermann, Head of Software and Automation at Böllhoff Automation. “Especially with the integration of servo technology at our company, which was new territory for us at the time, we were very well supported by KEB.”
With the COMBIVERT F6, drive controllers from KEB are used at Böllhoff, which can also be installed in the control cabinet as a push-through variant. The advantage: Heat can be emitted directly to the outside, resulting in less heat loss inside the control cabinet. This eliminates the need for an air conditioning unit, which leads to cost and space savings. For Münstermann, there are also other arguments in favour of working with KEB. For example, KEB was very easy to integrate into Böllhoff’s control architecture via the EtherCAT bus and the worldwide service points were also an important argument.