Low-maintenance locking pin with condition sensor

As an alter­na­tive to the wire­less Blue­tooth vari­ant, the Hein­rich Kipp plant now also has a cable-con­nect­ed lock­ing pin with sta­tus sen­sor in its prod­uct range. With this prod­uct, users are inde­pen­dent of bat­tery run­times, for exam­ple in mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, assem­bly and test­ing devices or in pack­ag­ing machine con­struc­tion. In addi­tion, inter­fer­ence-free sig­nal trans­mis­sion is guar­an­teed at all times, even at longer ranges with obsta­cles. The new lock­ing pins are part of the FEA­TURE­grip prod­uct line, which enables intel­li­gent process monitoring.

The inte­grat­ed induc­tive sen­sor of the lock­ing bolt detects the actu­a­tion sta­tus. The sig­nal is processed in the mush­room grip and trans­mit­ted to the machine con­trol sys­tem; a two-meter, three-core cable is pro­vid­ed for this as stan­dard. The sen­sor switch­es as soon as the bolt is pulled 1 mm. A machine con­trol sys­tem can be used, for exam­ple, to spec­i­fy that the machin­ing cycle does not start until all the studs are in the cor­rect position.

With IP67 pro­tec­tion, the cable-con­nect­ed design com­po­nents are resis­tant to splash water, pro­tect­ed against con­tact and dust-tight. In addi­tion, users can choose from (hard­ened or non-hard­ened) stain­less steel ver­sions. Mod­els are avail­able with pin diam­e­ters of 5–12 mm and in thread sizes from M10 to M20.

These lock­ing bolts are very suit­able, for exam­ple, for fix­ing and clamp­ing in guide sys­tems, in mon­i­tored assem­bly equip­ment, clas­si­cal­ly in swivel­ing or rotat­ing devices, and for stop posi­tion­ing. Machine parts can thus be brought into a new posi­tion only after the bolt has been dis­en­gaged and then clamped again. This pre­vents the lock­ing posi­tion from being changed by lat­er­al forces. Around 1,300 ver­sions are avail­able from the com­pa­ny in var­i­ous sizes, shapes, actu­a­tion types, pre­ci­sion lev­els and mate­ri­als. In addi­tion, spe­cial designs are also real­ized on request.

The spe­cial fea­ture of the prod­uct line is the instal­la­tion of inte­grat­ed electro­mechan­i­cal and sen­so­ry ele­ments. They pro­vide feed­back on spe­cif­ic para­me­ters or states and thus ensure process reli­a­bil­i­ty, which is becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant in mechan­i­cal engineering.