Minimised friction, twice the service life

Key facts at a glance:

New P4.1: Merging of two core skills for more service life

Since 1964, igus® has been developing and producing high-performance plastics for lubrication-free plain bearings and tough e-chains®. 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.

Intelligent networking and predictive maintenance with isense

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.

Crane equipment (indoor/outdoor), automated storage and retrieval systems, plant construction, gantry robots, material handling