Eaton Products Are No Soft Spot at Namoi Cotton

Eaton pumps and valves will enable Namoi Cotton to remotely reprogram its cotton gins that are spread out over 300,000 km (115,000 square miles).

Background

Cotton is one of Australia’s primary agricultural industries,and Eaton products are playing an important role in its processing.

One of the continent’s largest cotton marketers, Namoi Cotton Co-operative Ltd. of Wee Waa, New South Wales (NSW), is relying on Eaton pumps and valves for hydraulic circuitry for a cotton gin located in Merah North, NSW. Taking care of Namoi Cotton’s local Eaton product needs is Stenmar Fluid Systems of Kings Park, NSW, an Eaton products distributor and an expert in designing and supplying hydraulic systems specifically for cotton gins.

For many years, the cotton marketer relied on imported cotton gins plumbed with competitive hydraulic components, many of which Stenmar replaced with Eaton products due to performance issues. Because of the frequent, costly replacements, Namoi Cotton made the decision to purchase all future cotton gins without hydraulics and to rely on Stenmar and Eaton for custom hydraulic system design and components. 

Challenge

Typically each cotton gin houses a 4-meter (13-feet) long, 127-centimeter (5-inch) bore tramper cylinder that compacts loose cotton into bales. Stenmar specified three Eaton Hydrokraft™ PVWS250 open-loop piston pumps with pressure and load-sensing control to drive its in-house designed cylinder at the Merah North gin at a rate of 17 cycles per minute.The extremely short cycle time required very accurate control of deceleration and decompression—translating into a design challenge.

Solution

Stenmar designed a pump outlet-mounted manifold assembly to improve control of pump displacement. The manifold featured Eaton’s CVCS Series relief valve, plus a Valvistor® NG 25 proportional slip-in cartridge valve piloted by a KBFTG4V-3 proportional valve with spool feedback and onboard electronics featuring best-in-class IP65 and IP67 environmental protection ratings.

Namoi Cotton put the manifold assembly through a battery of test trials that proved it to be application worthy.

Results

Namoi Cotton was so pleased with the outcome that it made the decision to standardize on Eaton’s Valvistor NG 25 valve and KBFT valve combination with 4-20 mA current command input that allowseasy interface with an existing programmable logic controller. As a result, Namoi Cotton will be able to remotely reprogram its cotton gins that are spread out over 300,000 km (115,000 square miles).

In addition, Namoi Cotton requested that all future valves be equipped with onboard electronics.