Pneumatics is DEAD! Long LIVE Pneumatics!
That always struck me as an odd English saying, but I have come to understand it better during my working career.
Because more than once, I have been told and may have believed, that a certain industrial technology, was, unfortunately, on the way out, to be replaced by something newer and shinier.
Things like industrial bus systems will kill the electrical connector market. Wrong, sales skyrocketed.
Or wireless systems will kill the cabling market. Nope, didn’t happen.
Or that electric actuators will kill pneumatic systems. Au contraire!
Technologies have their advantages and disadvantages, pluses and minuses. It is wise not to latch onto just one, either established or new, and believe that the other will go the way of either the buggy whip or LaserDisc.
That rarely happens. At the very least, there are sweet area applications that will allow those technologies to live on and prosper.
At Hannover Messe this year, the first pneumatic cobot will be introduced that will have a unique feature set — and shows how creative minds can turn the “old” into some “new” again!
And illustrates again how “outsiders” to a market often see overlooked opportunities. But that is a subject for another day :)
