Through the experience in both areas and the research of new plastic compounds, igus® developers were able to further optimise the P4 system and significantly increase reliability and plant availability with the P4.1 roller chain. There is a bearing point for pivoting in every connection of the chain links. This has now been re-equipped with maintenance-free plain bearings, which more than doubles the service life. Container cranes in ports, for example, can therefore achieve service life expectation of more than 15 years or 20,000 and more operating hours.
In addition to the plain bearings, an intelligent wear sensor ensures a longer service life of the P4.1 roller chain for crane and linear robot systems. Due to the offset between upper run and lower run, the plastic rollers are not rolled over, but roll past each other to allow very smooth running. As a result, the coefficient of friction decreases and the drive power is reduced by 57 percent. Users like the world's largest crane manufacturer ZPMC have been relying on the reliable profile roller chain for many years.
As an option, the new P4.1 can be fitted with smart monitoring sensors. Thereby from a defined wear limit, a signal is issued to the igus® icom communication module and with it maintenance can be planned in advance. Depending on the customer's requirements, the data of the icom module can be used differently – for example for a pure maintenance message or with the connection to the igus data centre for an intelligent and dynamic service life prediction. In this case, the maintenance recommendations via Machine Learning and AI algorithms are constantly compared and defined with the data from many existing applications. Thanks to the intelligent networking of the P4.1 roller chain, the maintenance engineer can access the service life data of the e-chain® at any time.
- Inner height: 32 to 80mm
- Crossbars every link: crossbars removable along the inner and outer radius
- Longer service life due to maintenance-free tribo-polymer plain bearings in conjunction with the chain links
- Long travels of up to 800m and more
- High fill weight of up to 30kg/m
- Speeds of up to >5m/s
- Smart wear monitoring possible