As part of its participation at the Cape Industrial Show, Festo Cape Town toured the region with the Festo Expotainer, a mobile exhibition vehicle complete with working pneumatic and electric board, dynamic display cabinets and flat screen TV. As a global market leading automation specialist, the Festo group makes use of these demonstration trucks all over the world to bring its products and solutions to its customers’ premises.

For the Cape roadshow, the Expotainer was rigged as a Process Automation demonstration room with a selection of Process Automation products available from Festo. “The great thing about the Expotainer is not just that we go to the customer, but also the interchangeable displays within the Expotainer, which make it possible to cater to specific industry segments,” says Festo Regional Sales Manager, Peter Mulock-Houwer.

Starting at the Festo head office in Isando, the Expotainer headed south towards the Cape, a journey of almost 1 300 km to the first stop in Worcester. Here, the Expotainer team called on a processing plant for poultry, and later at a manufacturer of tanker and bulk trailers for the road freight industry.

A short hop to Ceres the next day and the Expotainer was used to demonstrate the capabilities of Festo in beverage processing and bottling. Another 30 km brought the Cape Town team to Tulbagh, where they visited more food processing plants and then onto Wellington. By the end of the week, the Expotainer rolled into Stellenbosch to see customers as well as engineers and lecturers from the university. Festo, through its industrial automation and training divisions, is very committed to education of our future engineers and technical specialists. As a global and local supporter of the international Worldskills competition in 4 different engineering disciplines, Festo is unique amongst its peers. Through Worldskills and their market leading Didactic division, Festo aims to help up-skill and train local artisans. “It was very gratifying to the team when a lot of interest was shown by the students doing their thesis in mechanical, chemical and electrical engineering,” smiles Mulock-Houwer.

From Stellenbosch, the Expotainer took a break from being on the road, when it was parked in the CTICC as part of the Festo stand at the Cape Industrial Show. Here, the displays in the Expotainer were supplemented by the dynamic displays on the stand, including the award winning Bionic Handling Assistant (BHA) or elephant trunk. This innovation is a product of the Festo Bionic Learning Network, where the company partners with universities and companies involved in creating new technologies and ideas with inspiration from nature. This showcase of the BHA was the first time it has been displayed in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Festo Road Show continued the next week after the Cape Industrial Showcase, with a visit to the Cape Town suburb of Newlands, where the Process Automation solutions installed within the Expotainer were demonstrated to the processing department of a local brewery. Moving onto a different type of process, the Expotainer stopped at one of the main players in the water industry to showcase what the company offers, and have already installed in a number of water projects within the greater Cape metropol, including Meulwater and Preekstoel.

The Expotainer was also made available to a member of the Festo Dealer network, Hydromatic, a Festo-approved dealer based in Malmesbury. With a team from both Festo Cape Town and Hydromatic, the Expotainer travelled to Atlantis and visited customers in that area, covering the automotive parts and food processing industries.

As the Expotainer left on its more than 1 400 km drive back to Johannesburg, Mulock-Houwer confirmed: “My team and I at Festo Cape Town are looking forward to speaking with the new and existing customers we visited with the Expotainer, as well as those who visited us at the Cape Industrial Showcase.” With their new, bigger premises in Ysterplaat, Festo Cape Town now offers even greater on-site stock holding for local customers in a more easily accessible location. “There are some updates planned for the Expotainer and when these are done, we’ll bring it back to Cape Town to show our customers, what more Festo can do for them to increase their productivity. This is, after all, the main goal of Festo, to be our customers’ partner in automation,” concludes Mulock-Houwer.

The Expotainer displays in brief
In addition to the Festo products installed in the Expotainer for the Road Show, a range of the precision German brand of valves, GSR, were also on display, for which Festo is the sole agency and supplier locally.

Other displays in the Expotainer included the Festo butterfly actuators DAPS and DFPB. The well-known CPX-MPA modular platform showed the superior control and customisation possible with is modular system. Flow and pressure sensors as well as the feedback sensor SRAP were also on board for the journey across the country. Still more display boards covered the new range of ADN pneumatic cylinders, the DGC range of linear pneumatic drives, vacuum grippers, vacuum generators and accessories together with a selection of electric drives from Festo.

In terms of moving displays, the Expotainer was equipped with a dynamic display that showed off the range of Festo grippers; the Fin, Bernoulli, and standard gripper range as well as their connection technology. This, together with a Chip handling system, displayed Festo’s competency in handling systems all the way through to the front unit.

For further information please contact:
Tracey Swart
Festo (Pty) Ltd
Tel: 08600 FESTO (33786)
Fax: 011 974 2157
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.oThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.