Höxter, 19 April 2017. On Tuesday, Hannelore Kraft, SPD chairperson for North Rhine-Westphalia, visited the Arntz Optibelt Group at its headquarters in Höxter, Germany. The Arntz Optibelt Group is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of high performance drive belts and has been based in Höxter for 145 years. The company is one of the “Hidden Champions” of the region and was only recently awarded a grant of EUR 650,000 by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment for its new test facility concept at the Höxter headquarters.
"Keep on the cutting edge. Stay innovative“, urged Hannelore Kraft, SPD chairperson of North Rhine-Westphalia. “Innovation is the key to success.”
Reinhold Mühlbeyer, chairman of Optibelt’s management team, says: “Our area of business is extremely technically complex and not always easy to demonstrate on paper, even though our products come into contact with many people in day-to-day life. Agricultural machinery, gardening equipment, mechanical engineering plants and vehicles, but also cash machines or washing machines, are driven using our drive belts. This is why we are particularly pleased when political representatives come and form an opinion of our production for themselves and we are able to present our ideas for the economic development of the region in a personal dialogue. This is bound to be beneficial for both sides.”
During the visit to the Höxter production plant, Optibelt also explained the new test facility to the SPD regional chairperson, which is currently being constructed at the Höxter plant for around four million euros. Covering an area of 2,200 square metres, it provides twice as much space as its predecessor. Series-production quality tests, tests for new developments and customer-specific tests will be carried out in the new test facility building. In order to reduce the electricity consumption of the test rigs for drive belts, the Arntz Optibelt Group has developed a new, practicable, environmentally-friendly test facility concept that is to be implemented this year.
The new test facility achieves a saving of 1.1 million kilowatt hours of energy each year and reduces CO2 emissions by up to 660 tonnes. The implementation of this energy-saving concept is being supported by a EUR 650,000 grant from the Federal Ministry for the Environment’s Environmental Innovation Program. This honours the initial, large-scale application of an innovative technology. As a requirement of the grant, the project goes beyond state-of-the-art technology and has the character of a demonstration facility.
Servo-controlled drives are used for the first time to apply loads to the belts. Also, the test facility is fitted with a diverse range of sensors, which transfer data to the company’s production parameter database so that errors can be detected at an early stage and test run times can be reduced. For noise reduction, the test rigs are set up in so-called test cells, either individually or in groups, in order to isolate them acoustically.
