Boulogne Composants Béton (BCB), one of France's traditional companies in the field of precast concrete elements, expanded its machinery to keep production efficient and to stay at a top level. The automated machines are provided by Echo Precast Engineering, a Progress Group company.
With how the construction market is evolving, the need is well known to work even more efficiently and responsibly with our resources than ever before and make sure the employees have a safe working environment. Automated machinery can make the work for the staff easier, while saving material and resources at the same time. BCB was aware of this development and is moving ahead in terms of automation, time saving and high-quality production, with a flying bucket D-Flyer and an automatic plotter SmartJet. The flying bucket D-Flyer transports dry or wet concrete from the concrete mixer to the designated position on elevated tracks. These tracks are positioned so that they don’t interfere with any other production machine or people, which increases the safety as well as the efficiency. The delivery of concrete will happen in intermediate hoppers which are in fixed positions or a moving half portal or bridge line supply to feed on the machinery on long beds. All speeds can be customized from its PLC in the control cabinet. With the automated plotter it is possible to write on hollow core slabs the markings needed. However, in this case the plotter is tailor made for plotting with paint on the long production beds. With these markings on the beds, it is possible for the employees to place the needed shuttering’s and inserts on the production beds before casting. The markings can be made exactly as planned, as it is plotted fully automatically, and the information is transferred to the machine directly and additionally checked by specialized software.