The starting signal
OekoSolve was founded in 2007 as a start-up in Switzerland by a professor of electrical engineering, an electrical engineering graduate and an economist; it currently has around 60 employees. It mainly develops and produces fine particle filters for living room firewood heaters and large woody biomass heaters with a capacity of 3 MW. The particulate filters use electrostatic to separate fine dust and reduce fine dust emissions in compliance with the regulations that apply across Switzerland; OekoSolve is currently working on compliance with EU regulations. Fine particle filters are used in wood burning stoves fired with pellets, wood chips and wood logs.
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“Time savings, simpler handling
and a next step towards automation”
OekoSolve is an innovative Swiss company that develops and produces fine dust filters for ecofriendly woody biomass heaters and sells them around the world. The company’s focus is on simple handling, reliability and ease of maintenance – with its entire development process geared toward precisely these objectives. GESIPA®, a company of the SFS Group, has been helping Oekosolve continuously develop its products and optimize processes for the past few years.
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OekoSolve needs around 300,000 stainless steel rivets a year to manufacture its fine particle filter systems. While riveting had been a manual process in the past that was accomplished with the help of a riveting gun, that changed when GESIPA® launched the GAV 8000 project in August 2021. The GAV 8000 is a blind riveter that boasts both an automatic blind rivet feed and an automatic mandrel disposal. After facing some challenges with the application of the riveter at the start, OekoSolve contacted GESIPA® and specialists were on site within two days’ time to provide OekoSolve with the all-round support it needed. Employees from both OekoSolve and GESIPA® worked together to find a solution and the GAV 8000 has been operating successfully ever since.
Enormous time and cost savings
This automated approach has enabled the company to cut both time and costs by half compared to conventional blind riveters. Not only that, but the integrated setting process monitoring feature also ensures that production processes are safe. Neither great force nor skilled staff are needed to operate the device and it can be easily integrated into fully automated production lines or connected to a robot. What’s more, the GAV 8000 now lets OekoSolve set twice as many blind rivets as before, namely up to 40 per minute. At OekoSolve, one container full is easily enough for a full day of work. Initially skeptical, the employees that operate the rivet setting machines are fully satisfied.
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“The GAV 8000 saves time, simplifies handling and lets us take the next step towards automation”
Partnership with SFS
Once the decision had been made to replace the TAURUS, a pneumatic-hydraulic blind rivet setting machine, with the GAV 8000 modular blind riveter not even three months passed until the first rivet had been set. GESIPA® provided training and support that went off without a hitch. OekoSolve is already playing with the idea of investing in a second GAV 8000 modular blind riveter from GESIPA® in 2023.
The partnership between OekoSolve and SFS is not limited to just riveting technology. Thanks to SFS’s broad portfolio of more than 200,000 products, its professional consultations and competent service, this swiftly growing company also relies on the products and services of SFS for its fasteners, quality tools and warehouse infrastructure.
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Facts & figures on the GAV 8000
- Cost-effective for volumes of about 300,000 or more blind rivets per year
- Cut time and costs by up to 50% compared to conventional blind riveters
- Special tube package gives rivet gun a large working radius of 5.0 m (standard length: 3.75 m)
- No skilled staff needed for operation
- Easy integration into fully automated production lines
- Processing speed of up to 40 blind rivets per minute
- Vacuum system for mandrel disposal
- Interface for external programmable logic controllers (PLC) via the GESIPA® interface
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