Horizontally supported planar surfaces – Industrial platform – Having plastic load-contacting surface
Patent
1996-05-21
1998-07-14
Chen, Jose V.
Horizontally supported planar surfaces
Industrial platform
Having plastic load-contacting surface
108901, B65D 1900
Patent
active
057788014
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
The present invention relates to a forklift pallet comprising a platform on the top surface of which goods can be placed for handling purposes, and itself resting above a rest surface. The invention also relates to a method of manufacturing it. The invention is applicable to handling goods in industries having high hygiene requirements, such as food industries, pharmaceutical and cosmetics industries, and "clean" technology industries.
A large number of forklift pallets are known, such as those described in approved French standard No. NF H 50-001, that comprise an upper platform resting on three runners that allow enough space between one another to enable the forks of forklift machines to be inserted between them.
Pallets of that type are commonly used for transporting and storing materials and merchandise of all kinds, and they are traditionally made of wood so as to provide a platform constituted by some number of parallel planks with or without gaps between them, which planks are generally nailed to three cross-members of essentially the same thickness as the planks of the platform, which cross-members are located at respective aligned ends of the planks and also halfway between said ends.
The runners are located beneath the cross-members and may be implemented in the form of solid beams, or in order to reduce the weight and the cost of a pallet, the runners may be implemented as a number of individual blocks for each runner.
Beneath the blocks there may be bottom planks extending parallel to the planks of the platform and interconnecting the blocks of each runner along their faces opposite from their faces connected to the cross-members.
The provision of bottom planks increases the stability of runners implemented as separate blocks.
Pallets of the above type have given entire satisfaction when it comes to transporting and storing a wide and varied range of materials and merchandise. Nevertheless, for reasons of hygiene, wood, and in particular the way in which the various planks, cross-members, and blocks are connected together, are not acceptable for handling foodstuffs that have not been packaged. The wooden surface and the interstices that necessarily exist between planks that have been nailed together prevent such pallets from being cleaned in completely hygienic manner since microbes take up residence in and proliferate in the interstices, and in the surface of the wood itself.
Proposals have been made to produce pallets of the above kind in a material other than wood and suitable for impeccable surface cleaning. Nevertheless, there remains a problem of microbes proliferating in the interstices between the planks which cannot be eliminated merely by changing the kind of material used.
To solve this remaining problem, proposals have been made to manufacture forklift pallets for use with foodstuffs in a shape that is geometrically identical to that described above, with the exception that the platform does not comprise a plurality of parallel planks but comprises a single sheet, the pallet being manufactured by molding polyethylene around reinforcement made of metal or of wood that is fully embedded within the polyethylene.
When pallets of that type are used during repeated cycles of use separated by cycles of cleaning, it has been found that incompatibility between physical properties such as thermal expansion or stiffness of the materials constituting the reinforcement and the molded plastic is such that after a certain number of cycles of use, cracks form at certain strategic locations in the pallet, which cracks again produce locations that are favorable to the proliferation of microbes while preventing cleaning since the cracks are too fine to enable effective cleaning to be performed.
An object of the present invention is to mitigate the drawbacks of the prior art and to create a pallet which can be manufactured at reasonable cost, i.e. cheaper than injected pallets, and which satisfies all the hygiene requirements of the food industry.
In addition, the type of pallet that the invention see
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