Erweiterung des warehouse der automatisierten kontrollleiste

The Physics of Cold Storage: Why “Out” is Wrong and “Up” is Profit

For plant managers running blast freezers or distribution centers at -25°C, the biggest enemy isn’t mechanical failure—it’s volume. Traditional forklift-operated warehouses require wide aisles (10-12 feet) for maneuvering. This results in a facility where you are paying electricity to cool 60% empty space (air) and only 40% product.

An Automated Pallet Warehouse expansion changes this ratio drastically. By implementing Starack’s double-mast stacker cranes, we reduce aisle widths to just under 5 feet (the width of the load plus clearance). More importantly, we utilize vertical space up to 40 meters (130 feet). This means for every pallet of frozen seafood or ice cream stored, the volume of surrounding air that requires refrigeration is minimized, directly cutting your energy cost per pallet by up to 30%.

Rack Clad Buildings: The Asset Strategy

When expanding, the traditional method involves two distinct costs: constructing a steel building shell and then buying racking to put inside it. This is inefficient.

The Starack solution utilizes a Rack Clad design. Here, the racking itself serves as the structural skeleton of the building. The walls and roof are bolted directly to the high-strength Q355 steel uprights. This offers two distinct advantages for your expansion:

• Construction Velocity: You eliminate the lead time for a separate building contractor. The warehouse goes up as the equipment is installed.
• Tax Implications: In many jurisdictions, a Rack Clad structure is classified as “equipment” rather than “real estate,” allowing for accelerated depreciation schedules compared to a standard 40-year building write-off.

Regenerative Braking: Converting Gravity into ROI

In a manual warehouse, lowering a 2,000 lb pallet of frozen fries from the top rack generates heat (friction in the forklift mast), which your cooling system then has to work harder to remove. It is a double penalty.

Our Automated Pallet Warehouse systems turn this physics problem into an energy solution. The lift motors are equipped with regenerative braking units. When the stacker crane lowers a heavy load from 30 meters, the motor acts as a generator, converting gravitational potential energy back into electricity. This power is fed back into the DC bus to power the horizontal travel motors or returned to your facility’s grid. For a high-throughput distribution center, this recovers substantial energy that would otherwise be lost as heat.

Solving the “Honeycombing” Effect with Density

Production runs in the food industry often result in high pallet counts of the same SKU (e.g., a 12-hour bottling run of the same beverage). Storing these in selective racking results in “honeycombing”—where empty slots are scattered throughout the warehouse, unusable because they are too deep or blocked.

For expansion projects where footprint is limited, we recommend the Starack-Shuttle or Multi-Deep configuration.

The stacker crane deposits a remote-controlled satellite shuttle into the rack lane. This shuttle carries the pallet deep into the storage channel (up to 10+ pallets deep). This eliminates aisles entirely between rack blocks. You sacrifice immediate selectivity of every single pallet (which you don’t need for large batch runs) in exchange for maximum cubic density. This is how you fit 10,000 pallets into a space that used to hold 3,000.

Frequently Asked Questions