TGW presents new generation of shuttles
(Marchtrenk, 18 July 2023) The Stingray shuttle is the efficient all-rounder for transporting totes, cartons, trays and hanging goods. More than 20,000 shuttles are in use worldwide and prove their reliability day after day. With this advanced shuttle generation, the topics of robustness and sustainability are increasingly coming into focus – for instance, the covers are made of wood. Thanks to the renewable raw material from local production sites, 25 tonnes of plastic can be saved per year.
As part of the FlashPick® goods-to-person system, shuttles play a central role along with other TGW solutions. They transport totes and cartons as well as trays weighing up to 50 kilograms. The Stingray HG (Hanging Garment) is a special variant designed for transporting hanging goods (e.g. dresses, coats or suits) on hangers.
The main strength of the Stingray is in the high or maximum performance range, whether for order picking or order consolidation, or in normal, refrigerated or deep-freeze environments. Capacity-driven applications with lower performance requirements can also be covered efficiently by partial loading.
With a throughput of more than 1,500 load carriers per hour, the latest generation of shuttles is the most powerful shuttle in the world: Its performance is ten per cent higher than its predecessor. The individual Stingray vehicles are 20 per cent faster with a top speed of 5 m/s.
"The latest Stingray generation unites the highest performance and reliability with energy-saving operation and sustainable materials", explains Thomas Gruber-Blanka, Director of Product Management at TGW. "Users benefit from an extremely short commissioning time thanks to the plug&play concept. Full data transparency also enables condition monitoring and predictive maintenance: Both help to optimally schedule maintenance and increase availability".
The shuttles also perform automatic "health checks" on their own, detect twisted totes and resolve the situation without human intervention. All in all, manual interventions can be reduced by 90 per cent and the maintenance effort by 75 per cent.
Since shuttles accelerate and decelerate several hundred times per day; the potential for saving energy is especially high in this area. The Stingrays store braking energy in power capacitors and then make it available to all vehicles on the same level for acceleration. All shuttle and tote lifts are also equipped with a recuperation function as a standard feature, feeding unused energy back into the power network. In addition, the dynamic parameters can be adjusted flexibly, depending on the order situation.
