High-tech industry

Karlskoga in Sweden, is a city with an industrial history that dates back a long time. For instance, the industrial company Bofors was founded here, with the Nobel Prize founder Alfred Nobel as one of the main owners. The city continues to be characterized by high-tech companies to this day. One of them is Cell Impact, which manufactures advanced flow plates. The company has a unique, self-developed method for shaping 0.1 mm thin steel at high speed. The material is very delicate, which means all components must be handled with utmost care during manufacturing.

Martin Florén has been working as a machine operator at Cell Impact for 1.5 years. In his profession, he operates laser welding machines and laser cutters. At the welding station, he lifts a lid that can weigh up to 4 kg about 100 times a day. Even though the staff tries to take turns at the stations, the job eventually became quite heavy. But it wasn’t just ergonomics at the workplace that played a role when Cell Impact decided to invest in lifting aids.

“We used to lift with a suction cup with a plastic handle. It could sometimes release the lids, which are quite expensive. Moreover, the pressure had to be evenly distributed over the entire plate for a good weld. When we encountered problems, it was often because a lid had been dropped and damaged,” Martin explains.

Lifting a few kilos about a hundred times a day was also challenging.

“It gets heavy, that’s for sure. Besides, it doesn’t feel right to lift such expensive things with a plastic handle. There must be another solution.”

A safe solution

To ensure safety when handling the lids, Cell Impact chose to use lifting aids from Lifts All. The solution was a z-gripper – a vacuum lifter with a balanced control unit that makes the load feel weightless. The z-gripper is suspended from a jib crane, which expands the work area where the tool can be used. Additionally, the z-gripper has a safety feature that allows it to slowly descend to the ground in case of air interruption or pressure drop, instead of falling freely.

“The difference is tremendous!” Martin says. “It’s like day and night – now it doesn’t even feel like you’re lifting. There’s no strain at all. My colleagues also appreciate the tool and how easy it is to use.”

And what about the issue with the occasionally dropped lids?

“As far as I know, no lids have been dropped or fallen since we made the switch,” Martin says.

• Cell Impact manufactures flow plates: very thin metal plates used in fuel cells and sometimes in electrolyzers.
• The plates are formed by a pneumatic punching unit that rapidly and precisely shapes a metal substance between two precision tools.