The objective changes that took part in our country in the early ninetieth were accompanied by countrywide decrease of industrial manufacturing and, particularly, machine engineering. This caused a dramatic decrease of demand at the market of automatic warehousing systems. A lot of manufacturers had to redirect their activities under those conditions and they never returned to the previous activities. However after we went through those difficulties we managed to keep our scientific and engineering potential and continue working in the sphere of production of automatic warehousing equipment.

The planning and design office kept working in the sphere of increasing of the company’s areas of activity. After the Technopribor JSC was formed and the bureau was reorganized in the year of 1996, a new stage in the Company’s history was started. In that very year we started manufacturing of a new generation of highly effective equipment designed for transportation of bulk and viscous materials – ‘Technocon’ tube chain conveyors. ‘Technocon-219’, the first tube chain conveyor, was put into operation at the Astrakhan river port and was designed for loading of granulated sulfur into holds of bulk carriers. Manufacturing of this equipment, included into the model range of ‘Technocon 108/159/219’ tube chain conveyors and screw conveyors, still remains one of the areas of the company’s activities.

The operation principle of a tube chain conveyor consists in the following: a chain with transporting disks transports granular materials within a hermetic pipe. The flexibility of the chain allows changing of the route position in horizontal, inclined and vertical directions. It also allows placement of the conveyor in narrow and hardly accessible areas. Due to the hermetic nature of the pipe even a short-grained granular material doesn’t penetrate into the environment while a special structure of the disks allows effective use of the volume of the conveyor pipe.

During this period various enterprises belonging to different industries began to use the tube chain conveyor. The enterprises included ‘Novocheboksarsk biological treatment facilities plant’, ‘Kazan bakery plant no.2’, Ulyanovskcement’ JSC, city of Novoulyanovsk’.

The sales geography of tube chain conveyors was gradually growing and its functional characteristics were also increasing. Today the conveyors sold in various regions of Russia and abroad are equipped with systems designed for cooling, heating and batching of the transported materials.