Car owners know the problem if the car is dirty. Dirt sticks and it looks ugly. There is no way around washing the vehicle. This is where car washes come into play. They are there to clean vehicles such as lorries, cars, buses or even trains. As a rule, a distinction is made between car washes, self-service car washes and gantry car washes. In car washes, the car passes through a conveyor belt through various stages of cleaning. Customers do not have to leave the car. On the other hand, there are car washes in which the car wash is done manually. Here the vehicles are cleaned by high-pressure cleaners and foam brushes. The third form of car wash is the gantry car wash. The car is left standing after driving the car into the car wash. The cleaning process starts and brushes do the cleaning fully automatically. In order to meet the ever-increasing demands on modern washing systems, the motion plastics specialist igus helps to increase the service life of your systems with maintenance-free and self-lubricating high-performance plastics while reducing costs.
This car wash uses industrial robots to clean lorries outside. The most adverse environmental conditions such as ore dust, heat and moisture pose challenges to the components installed. e-chains withstand the influences and work flawlessly.
In a tyre soaping station, metal bearings were used up to now, which regularly led to a breakdown of the system. Now, these bearings have been replaced with plastic bearings made of igus bar stock . This saves costs of several thousand Euro per year.
In this car wash, the underbody of the car is cleaned. Two rotating nozzles clean the vehicles with high-pressure jets and must be resistant to dirt and water. Metallic bearings are replaced by iglidur plain bearings, which reduce failures during operation caused by the absence of lubricants.
Manual washing of trains is dispensed with in this modern system. From the beginning, an automated process takes care of the washing and subsequent drying. Due to the small installation space, e-chains and chainflex cables are used for the movement.
For the adjustment of a protective door in a car wash, a reliable guide system which requires a low driving force was needed. The drylin W linear guide system now incorporates a component that is maintenance-free and inexpensive.
Tribo-polymers developed for dry operation: the dry-tech test laboratory
A view of the igus test laboratory for energy chains
