If you’re a fan of old “I Love Lucy” reruns, you likely know this famous scene: the pies are coming down the conveyor belt faster and faster. Lucy can’t keep up, and pies are piling up. It’s a mess. Hilarious, right? But not in real life – say, if your packaging equipment goes awry and the product is dumping all over the floor instead of neatly into boxes, or your bottling line malfunctions.
It’s not just a mess, it’s a serious safety hazard. Emergency brakes are critical for industrial environments, such as industrial packaging.
Packaging facilities are a big operation. They are filled with complex equipment that transports items by conveying, lifting and/or rotating them, often at high speeds. At certain points, the line has to slow or hold in place. But if you lose air or hydraulic pressure, or some other problem occurs, emergency brakes protect people and reduce the potential for costly physical damage and downtime.
W.C. Branham's fail-safe brakes stop automatically
Fail-safe brakes are specifically designed for emergency stopping or holding of industrial machinery. They get their name from the fact that they are always engaged. Here's a short video that explains how fail-safe brakes work. In a nutshell, an active minimum pressure (air or hydraulic) holds the brake piston in position, free of the brake disc rotor. That energy is stored in a Belleville disc spring stack. A loss of pressure triggers the spring to release, applying the brake for positive stopping.
Here at W.C. Branham, we make both pneumatic and hydraulic fail-safe brakes, which are both ideal for industrial machinery emergency braking.
Types of Spring-Applied Brakes
Pneumatic — We manufacture a wide variety of pneumatic spring-applied brakes, designated PFS for “pneumatic fail-safe,” in five different series with clamping force ratings from 1033 up to 27,192 lb. (4592 up to 120,956 N) and release pressures between 75 and 100 PSI.
All of these models are available in eight standard brake disc thicknesses, from 5/32” to 1-1/8,” as well as custom thicknesses, including metric sizes.
Hydraulic — We also make eleven different series of hydraulic spring-applied brakes (FS). These are available in the same range of standard brake disc thicknesses as our pneumatic spring-applied brakes. We can also provide custom-sized spacers, in Imperial or metric measurements for our FS brakes.
W.C. Branham components allow you to design equipment that works exactly as you intend, for many years. Our fail-safe products go even further to protect not only your investment but the people working your facility.
We know it can feel overwhelming to zero in on the best fail-safe braking options for your application. We’re happy to give you a hand in finding, or custom-designing, solutions that are reliable, cost-effective, and safe. Just contact our team of experts.
