Flexible and scalable - The KingDrive from TGW

The technology encompasses a conveyor system with small functional sections that enable changes to be made to accommodate different and new requirements affecting the items to be handled or the material flow itself.

"We listen to our customers who told us that they needed a long lasting, highly efficient conveyor system and we took this requirement as the starting point for the development of our new KingDrive conveyor,” explains Christoph Wolkerstorfer, MD of TGW Mechanics.

"The new conveyor technology has to be highly reliable during a long life cycle, provide high performance, be adaptable to changing requirements and it must be able to easily grow and change with the expansion of our customers’ businesses.”

TGW’s development team has succeeded in producing a conveyor design that provides for all these requirements in one single conveyor: the KingDrive Technology.

Operations manager at the pharmaceuticals wholesaler Fiebig Jürgen Dussel says: "It really is a revolutionary technology compared to everything we have seen on the conveyor market so far.

"It is extremely quiet in operation, consumes far less energy than other technologies and has performed perfectly since the very first minute of operation.”

The basic concept is the conveying function is broken down to its smallest functional unit – the individual roller.

"Consider an ant colony if you will. Ants are super-organisms operating as a unified entity, supporting the colony with each ant acting independently,” says Wolkerstorfer.

"This way they are able to be flexible; able to adapt and react on whatever obstacle they encounter. And we follow the same principle with the KingDrive conveyor technology.” Each roller can easily be controlled independently from the others. Only the rollers required to complete a task or movement are activated, they can change the way in which they operate by adjusting acceleration, speed and function. The adaptability of the KingDrive system is designed for change, it is easily expandable and consumes the absolute minimum energy reducing total cost of ownership for our clients.



Procedures and processes in the KingDrive system are highly automated.

"Although each of our conveyor solutions is customised to the customer’s individual needs, we are able to easily configure and reconfigure the function of every single conveyor element using our design tools. This results in a highly automated configuration of the controls software,” explains Wolkerstorfer.

Following these principles TGW produces, wires, configures and tests all conveyor parts in-house before shipping the conveyors to the customer’s site. On site the Plug & Play functionality offers the additional benefits of the shortest installation and commissioning times.

Jürgen Dussel confirms that the new KingDrive conveyor solution "has been installed and commissioned in record time. We have used conveyor systems for a long period but it was the first time that we’ve experienced the Plug & Play concept and it really has worked for us”.

"A conveyor system has to operate for a long time, adds Wolkerstorfer. "Therefore it was important for us to create a technology that needs as little maintenance as possible.”

TGW’s product development team determined that a gearless motorised roller was the answer to this requirement. The KingDrive roller technology provides low maintenance cost, flexible speed and acceleration and adaptable payload characteristics in light goods conveyor systems. When used in combination with state-of-the-art controls technology based on highly standardised components, this new KingDrive roller technology will reduce the overall life cycle costs of an automated distribution centre.

The KingDrive Technology offers an all encompassing solution, exceptional performance with the customer’s future in mind. It is flexible by design, offers high performance and a long operational life as well as low maintenance and highest energy efficiency.