Meyn America upgrades conventional safety controls to reduce downtime

Meyn America LLC, a Georgia-based manufacturer of poultry processing equipment, has reduced line downtime due to frequent equipment washdown by upgrading conventional safety controls, the company said.

This was accomplished by working with engineers from Pilz Automation Safety L.P. to upgrade conventional safety relays to a modular safety controller.

Meyn's vice president of after sales Dale Stolzfus said the use of the upgraded PNOZmulti safety configuration will reduce downtime due to troubleshooting by at least 60 to 70 percent.

Meyn America engineer Dustin Addison selected the Pilz PNOZmulti modular safety system to control the emergency stop switches as it has features that allows identification of the specific emergency stop button(s).

Meyn America's previous safety system used conventional relays. When water caused a fault that stopped the line, a general e-stop alarm was displayed. All e-stop switches and cables had to be manually controlled, which took a lot of work and time.