Herochu Intelligent Automatic Sheet Metal Storage System 2025 – Turn Idle Floor Space into Profit-Per-Square-Foot
A single pallet of 6 mm stainless arrives, is weighed to the kilogram, logged into MES, slotted into a 9 m/min lift and ready for the laser before the forklift has left the bay. That sequence, not marketing copy, is what the Herochu Intelligent Automatic Sheet Metal Storage System 2025 delivers every three minutes, hour after hour, for one operator seated at a 10-inch colour touchscreen. Starting at eighteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars for a two-tower starter block, each unit is CE, UE and ISO 9001 certified and can be widened, deepened or doubled in height without ever breaking the original PLC program.
Traditional ground stacking is a silent thief: it steals floor area, labour hours and surface quality while quietly increasing insurance premiums. By folding the same inventory into a 4.8 m × 4.8 m cube, the Herochu 3015 model releases up to seventy percent of the area you are currently walking around. The saving is not theoretical; a 23 m² footprint now houses eight different sheet sizes that once sprawled across seventy-four square metres, instantly creating room for a second laser or an extra bending cell without extending the building.
The mechanics are deceptively simple. Each tower is a self-supporting grid of high-strength steel uprights pierced on a fifty-millimetre pitch. Drawer pallets ride on sealed linear guides and are propelled by a twin-chain drive rated for five thousand kilos per level. Vertical lift motors accelerate at 0.3 g to 9 m/min, while the in-out shuttle cruises at 12 m/min, delivering a 3 t stack to the pick-up station in under forty seconds. Position feedback comes from an absolute encoder; repeatability is ±0.5 mm, tight enough for a robot to pick directly without re-centring.
Load verification happens automatically. Four strain-gauge cells built into each cradle capture gross weight the instant the pallet seats; the PLC compares the reading with the theoretical mass stored in the part number file and flags any deviation beyond two percent. That single check prevents double-sheet feeding, eliminates scrap caused by wrong gauges and gives your ERP real-time consumption data without a manual keyboard stroke.
Flexibility is engineered, not promised. Shelf height adjusts by seventy-millimetre steps, so 0.8 mm aluminium and 25 mm wear plate can coexist in adjacent slots. Standard bays accept 3000 × 1500 mm, 4000 × 2000 mm or 6000 × 2500 mm sheets; non-standard sizes up to 8000 × 2600 mm are handled by extending the mast and lengthening the chain loop—no new control licence required. Load per layer can be de-rated to 1.5 t for lightweight alloys or boosted to 5 t for thick hot-rolled plate simply by swapping in a heavier chain set and larger drive motor, a two-hour service event.
Integration with existing automation is plug-and-play. The cabinet arrives with Ethernet/IP, OPC-UA and Modbus TCP already configured; within minutes the storage system appears on the same HMI that drives your laser or punch. A RESTful API lets Python scripts request pallets by barcode, QR or RFID, making midnight “lights-out” runs practical. If the cutting centre calls for twenty sheets of 2 mm mild steel, the tower pre-positions the first four while the laser is still nibbling the previous nest, cutting idle time to the length of one shuttle stroke.
Safety is invisible until it matters. Electromechanical interlocks prevent lift movement while a drawer is extended; limit blocks arrest free-fall in the unlikely event of chain rupture, and a light curtain across the load station stops all motion if an operator steps inside the envelope. The structure itself is calculated for seismic zone 4 and wind zone 2, so the same rack that saves space in Birmingham is still compliant when your company opens a second plant in Guadalajara.
Surface quality, often an afterthought in vertical systems, is protected by plastic-coated support fingers and optional felt-lined saddles. Stainless, aluminium and pre-painted stock leave the rack as scratch-free as they arrived, removing the costly step of re-polishing before painting or cladding. For ferrous material, a low-voltage copper bus bar can be specified to create a Faraday cage that prevents condensation during humid seasonal swings.
Energy consumption is modest enough to ignore in utility budgets. A complete two-tower block draws 2.1 kW during lift acceleration and 0.3 kW at idle, roughly the same as a domestic kettle. Regenerative drives return braking energy to the DC bus, cutting total consumption by twelve percent compared with non-regenerative models, while ultra-capacitors smooth peak loads so the building transformer never notices the start-stop profile.
Purchasing follows a modular philosophy. A basic block contains two towers, one lift and one in-out station, storing sixty tonnes in a six-level configuration. Add a second lift and throughput doubles; add satellite towers fed by transfer car and you approach the realm of continuous sheet supply. Every expansion re-uses the original control licence and HMI, so the first dollar invested is never stranded. Lead time for standard 3015 or 4020 models is thirty calendar days; customised 6025 or 8025 towers ship in forty-five days, crated in 40 ft containers that unload with a single forklift.
Return on investment is blunt arithmetic. A typical Northern European job-shop spends twenty-two euros per hour on labour plus thirty-eight euros per hour on floor space and handling equipment. Recovering six man-hours per day and seventy square metres of floor space saves roughly one hundred and twenty thousand euros per annum, meaning the eighteen-thousand-euro starter block repays itself in less than two months. Factor in reduced scrap, fewer crane cycles and improved laser utilisation and the pay-back drops below forty-five days in three-shift operations.
Herochu’s Intelligent Automatic Sheet Metal Storage System 2025 is not a reaction to today’s labour shortage; it is a hedge against tomorrow’s market volatility. Whether you are planning a green-field “black-light” factory or retrofitting a twenty-year-old hall, the towers scale without rewriting code, protect every sheet like museum glass, and deliver the kind of silent, repeatable order that turns overhead into profit per square foot.
