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FEATURE DRIVES, CONTROLS & MOTORS Developing inDustrial
Drive solutions to tackle a range of problems
Definitions of engineering include: the practice of designing and building, the study of
advancement in a particular area, or the action of working artfully to make something occur. At Technidrive, all of these definitions are true. Based in Northern Ireland, the company
specialises in engineering custom solutions, creating industrial drive solutions for the quarrying, water, food and dairy industries
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ounded in 1998, Technidrive creates industrial drive solutions for the quarrying, water, food, and dairy industries. Continually
developing solutions to meet and exceed market trends, it specialises in electric motors, industrial gear units and electrical automation. In response to growing customer demands, the
company has invested heavily in its state of the art premise in Portadown, Co. Armagh, spending over £250,000 on improvements to assembly and painting facilities with an extension to make space for an increased volume of stock. As a result, the assembly facility can now accommodate up to £4 million in stock of drives, motors, industrial gear units and automation. This additional space will facilitate the growing
demand for drive assembly and supply from Technidrive. In fact the company boasts Premier Partner status with Brazilian motor manufacturer, WEG, and BEST Partner status with Italian automation specialist, Bonfiglioli. These accolades enable Technidrive to house the most extensive stock of these brands in Ireland. The company is also an appointed partner of Hitachi industrial inverters and programmable logic control (PLC) components, in addition to housing equipment from other leading manufacturers such as Vega, Omron and REO.
“At Technidrive, we’ve prioritised improving our
facility to ensure we can hold a large volume of stock,” explained David Strain, technical director at Technidrive. “We need to ensure that our customers are shielded from supply chain issues and that we have a steady supply of premium products for their production.” In addition to holding stock, the company
has the ability to develop new and customised drive solutions. “This includes a new compact drum drive that we’ve recently developed for high torque, low speed applications,” said Strain, “We regularly receive requests for bespoke equipment and smarter use of our space allows us to facilitate this.”
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As a technology developer, innovations from Technidrive include Powerdrive, the company’s own brand of customisable gear units, available as open gears, log washer gears, mixer gears or other bespoke gearboxes. The range of shaft mounted gear units are available from 30mm bore up too 1200mm bore, and each is provided with a torque arm as standard. In fact the company’s strength is its ability
to take an industry challenge, and use its in-house engineering expertise to create a solution. An example of this is its automatic jaw crusher unblock system, developed to improve safety and efficiency of jaw crushing in the quarrying industry. “It’s a major problem when a jaw crusher
comes to a halt because it’s full of stones,” explained Strain. “It requires either a jackhammer or winch, or in the worst cases, someone to manually go in and remove the stones. Our jaw crusher unblock system removes the need for human intervention in this dangerous environment, and creates a way to automate this common pain point in quarrying.”
1 DESIGN SOLUTIONS MARCH 2023 2
The company has developed an automatic jaw crusher unblock system
Technidrive developed the system from
scratch, calculating the power, torque and speed requirements to determine the necessary electric motor and gear units. Using a variable speed drive (VSD) with built-in soft PLC functions, Technidrive supplied motion control that could unblock the crusher automatically. “A crucial part of this system was innovative
software,” explained Strain. “The system has a start-up function when starting the jaw crusher from full, so the VSD can be remotely activated into unblock mode. This automatically controls the direction, current, ramp times, DC bus voltage, torque, position and speed of the system until the crusher has been successfully unblocked.” Other innovations from Technidrive include
variable speed vacuum pump solutions for the dairy industry, automated lifts for warehouses and a host of other custom built solutions for drive-based applications.
engineering solutions
“We believe every problem has a bespoke solution. We’re not just a supplier and we’re definitely not just a distributor – we’re a system integrator. We take the best equipment that our principal suppliers can build and we engineer them together into bespoke solutions for our client base,” explained James Chester, director at Technidrive.
Technidrive T: 028 3751 8111
www.technidrive.co.uk
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