Design the best, most efficient and cost-effective pallet for any specific need.
With the Pallet Design System™ (PDS), an engineering, design and marketing tool, you can design the optimum pallet by scientifically determining the safe load carrying capacity, performance and material quantity needed. PDS takes end-user requirements into consideration as it uses fundamental engineering principles to calculate and examine each possible solution.

Pallet Design System Free Download 64-bit
Pallet Design System Free Download Utorrent
Pallet Design System Free Download Free
Pallet Design System Free Download Version
Pallet Design System Free Download Windows 7

Multimedia systems design by Andleigh, Prabhat K. Publication date 1996 Topics. Oldpallet IA13568 Openlibraryedition OL1268987M Openlibrarywork OL3738277W.
Pallet Design System. At Lima Pallet Company, Inc. We utilize Computer Aided Drafting software to produce detailed schematics for our custom designed pallets. Under built pallets are dangerous and overbuilding is not economical. By using PDS software we ensure our customers’ specifications are met with the minimum of waste and cost.

Quick Pallet Maker is an easy to learn pallet loading and package design software application that allows the user to calculate optimal secondary package dimensions and pallet arrangements, thus reducing shipping costs.

With the Pallet Design System^TM (PDS), an engineering, design and marketing tool, you can design the optimum pallet by scientifically determining the safe load carrying capacity, performance and material quantity needed. PDS takes end-user requirements into consideration as it uses fundamental engineering principles to calculate and examine each possible solution.
The full user interface and customer handouts are available in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

Forget pallets at your peril when designing automated systems. Better performance and substantial cost savings can be achieved through integrated design.

Ralph Rupert, manager of unit load technology for Millwood Inc., spoke on the topic, ‘Pallet Performance in Automated Storage Systems’ at ProMat 2017. (This story was originally published in 2017).

Millwood is a national pallet supplier headquartered in Ohio with manufacturing operations and supply partners throughout the U.S. Ralph, former director of the Center for Unit Load Design at Virginia Tech, helps Millwood account managers develop the proper pallet design for customers.

“One of those areas that we often run into is automatic storage and retrieval systems,” he said. His remarks focused on the variables that are considered in pallet design.

How a pallet interacts with an automated handling system depends on several factors, he noted: the size of the pallet, the direction of travel, lifting limitations, friction, load capacity and deflection.

As to size, while most people think the standard 48×40 pallet is the predominant pallet design, it represents only about 30 percent of new pallets that are manufactured each year, according to Ralph. Over 50 percent of new pallets are odd sizes. He referred to a Millwood customer that requires 105 pallet designs. Another uses a 42-square pallet at all of its eight plants, but the design of the pallet is different at each one.

Pallet Design System Free Download 64-bit

“The pallet is really part of the (automated) system

and should not be overlooked until after the fact.”

– Ralph Rupert

ANSI Pallet Standard Available for Free Download

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has a standard for pallets, and it is published by the MHI. (Ralph chairs the ANSI committee that is responsible for the standard.) “It’s a good standard,” he said, “and more and more people should be using it.” A show of hands indicated only three people in the audience were familiar with the standard.

The latest version of the standard was published in 2016 after a 10-year process and is available as a free download from the MHI website. (Click here to download). It includes updated information for pallets made of non-wood materials, including metal, plastic, and paper-based as well as information pertaining to pallets for U.S. military applications and automated storage and retrieval systems.

For example, the standard as related to pallet size allows a variation of +0.125-inch to -0.250-inch for length and width and +0.125-inch to -0.325-inch for height.

Travel of Direction Considerations

In terms of the direction of travel, the ideal direction or position for the pallet to move in automated material handling systems is the length of the bottom deck board to be aligned in the direction of travel so that the deck board spans multiple conveyor rollers and the pallet is in the most stable configuration. (Think of it as the bottom deck boards being aligned at a 90-degree angle to the rollers.)

“This is the bad direction,” said Ralph, referring to a slide showing a pallet oriented so the bottom deck boards were parallel to the rollers. The photograph showed the bottom deck board just barely spanned two rollers compared to the other direction, in which the bottom deck boards spanned seven rollers. Barely spanning only two rollers will cause vibration of the pallet as it is traveling down the roller conveyor toward the stretch wrapper, said Ralph. Vibration will cause swaying and the load to “mushroom,” he said.

He had visited a customer recently where the pallet was oriented correctly, but the conveyor had widely spaced rollers. In the 20 feet the pallet traveled from the palletizer to the stretch wrapper, the top layers of plastic bags of product mushroomed outward 6 inches because of uneven travel. The stretch wrapper had to pull product back within the pallet footprint. The company invested in additional rollers to solve the problem, which allowed it to reduce the amount of stretch wrap it needed to use.

“It goes back to understanding those interactions between the pallet the handling system, and how costs may be reduced by managing those interactions more efficiently,” Ralph said.

Another factor in direction of travel is whether there is a change of direction sequence — turning the pallet 90 degrees, for example — and what equipment is used to accomplish that change, such as a turntable or a transfer chain. Both work well, noted Ralph, although a turntable slows down throughput.

Pallet Opening and Friction

Ralph told a story that emphasized the importance pallet opening and friction considerations. Several years ago, a customer visiting the Virginia Tech pallet laboratory thought he had an issue with a plastic pallet related to friction. The case was unusual because the customer thought the problem was that the pallets were too slippery on the facility floor, which is not normally a problem point concerning friction. Normally, the issue of friction is related to the pallet not sliding off forks or rollers, or product not sliding off the deck of the pallet.

On visiting the customer location, many dislodged rubber grommets on the floor were observed. Grommets are used to increase friction, including on the bottom face of the pallet so plastic pallets are not too slippery for safe handling with steel forks. It turned out that the customer had specified plastic pallets with a three-inch opening and that the pallet jacks being used to move the pallets required a 3.5-inch opening. The jack forks were being jammed into the pallets, popping loose grommets, and pallets were sliding on the floor because of the tight fit. In this case, what the customer believed to be a friction problem was, in fact, a problem of the pallet opening not being high enough to accommodate the material handling equipment being used.

Pallet Load Capacity

Load capacity refers to how much weight the pallet can support. In this

Design the best, most efficient and cost-effective pallet for any specific need.

Pallet Design System Free Download 64-bit

“The pallet is really part of the (automated) system

and should not be overlooked until after the fact.”

– Ralph Rupert