It is almost 200 years old. Nevertheless, today the Veltins brewery is one of the most modern private breweries in Europe. When you enter the traditional Sauerland brewery, it is hard to miss the fact that all the signals here are pointing towards growth and innovation: as if controlled by an invisible hand, gondolas of a monorail overhead conveyor move in a never-ending sequence through the hall in front of the empties high-bay warehouse. Some bring around 40 crates of empties at a time, others are loaded with full crates. Where the crates come from or are taken to remains hidden from view. This is because the EFA-SRT-MS machine safety gates from Efaflex only allow the crates to pass through fully automatically for brief moments and then close again immediately so that people do not come into contact with the transport systems.

"We were looking for a manufacturer to build safe high-speed doors for a conversion in 2019. The machine safety doors from Efaflex met our requirements exactly," explains Martin Findeklee. He is responsible for the entire project planning for the new logistics systems. "The doors also had to be very fast. With several bottling lines filling up to 80,000 bottles per hour, 24 hours a day, they also have to complete a large number of opening cycles per day. Some doors open and close every 40 seconds." Others have already completed well over 100,000 opening cycles in two years. "The doors meet our expectations perfectly." They have to. Because at worst, the entire plant would come to a standstill if one of the doors were to fail. Installing the new machine safety gates in the existing building was by no means easy. The installation situation was very cramped and the doors had to be precisely matched to the clearance height and width of the Euro pallets loaded with returnable crates. "Despite this, the installation went very well," emphasizes Martin Findeklee.

Successful installation even under difficult conditions

Over the course of two years, another brand new building with five levels has now been constructed on the brewery site. Among other things, there will be space for two bottling lines. The situation here is similar to that in front of the empties warehouse. In order for the bottles to reach the filling line, the pallets with the crates are pushed into vertical conveyors via conveyor technology, again through machine safety gates from Efaflex. There they travel to the appropriate level. The fully automatic system controls which pallets reach the production line depending on the utilization of the conveyor technology.

Some of the doors for the elevators, in which the pallets are moved up to 25 meters up or down, could not be fixed to the hall floor. The Efaflex fitters bolted them to special metal plates in the shaft.

Thanks to their space-saving, self-contained design, Efaflex machine safety doors can be perfectly integrated into the required protective equipment. They stand out due to their extraordinary load-bearing capacity and stability. The standard door leaf of the EFA-SRT-MS is fully transparent and is fitted with warning strips as standard. The interaction between the powerful frequency inverter control and the functionally adapted drive enables a very high cycle rate of up to seven cycles per minute in production processes.