Logismarket, the Industrial Directory.

Curtis Instruments have recently been delighted to solve another challenging technical situation - involving safety equipment on board Eurostar trains – in conjunction with two other noted suppliers.

Safety Trolley Systems – based in Cornwall – is a specialist engineering firm which designs and builds handling equipment. They were approached by fire extinguisher manufacturers Kidde Graviner who had a problem handling large and heavy fire fighting cylinders, used on board the Eurostar trains. The cylinders, weighing 350 kg each, are sent to Kidde Graviner for refurbishment and testing. They then need to be picked up and rotated in either direction and the contents need to be agitated whilst it is being filled. The cylinders have to be rotated +10 degrees and -10 degrees from the horizontal continually whilst the filling is taken place.

When the cylinder is full the operator needs to take manual control of the cylinders rotation, and it has to be accurately weighed. This would be done by a load cell system built in to the head. STS have supplied considerable equipment that manipulated the load but the agitation of the cylinder was something new. STS turned to Curtis Instruments for the electronic programmable control system.

“We have been using Curtis control equipment on all of our products for many years so we knew that they would be able to develop the control system we needed” says Simon Studer, STS Engineering Director. Curtis met with STS to establish the specification and function needed of the control system. This culminated in Curtis supplying two control boxes with specially written software. The unit was built and supplied to Kiddie Graviner, and Colin Jones, Technical Director from STS commissioned the unit on site at Kidde. And as he observes “The operators were delighted with the way the equipment performs. The new clever unit has made the cylinder handling safe and efficient and facilitated a faster and smoother operation”.