Automatic Sliding Gate

Overview

An automatic sliding gate closes a driveway or industrial entrance with a single steel panel that slides sideways rather than swinging, so it needs no arc of clearance and works on a slope. The visible parts are the moving panel and a low operator box beside it; everything else is the guideway it rolls on and the electronics that decide when to move.

The panel is the Gate Leaf: a welded steel perimeter frame filled with pickets or mesh, carried on bottom guide rollers and kept upright by catch rollers on the post. Along its bottom rail runs a bolt-on Gear Rack, the toothed bar the drive engages. The whole leaf rides the Ground Track & Stops, an anchored ground rail with mechanical end stops at each extreme of travel.

How it works

Drive comes from the Gate Operator, a box bolted next to the track. A brushless BLDC Drive Motor turns a self-locking Reduction Gearbox, and the gearbox output Drive Pinion meshes with the gate rack to push and pull the leaf. Because the worm stage is self-locking, the closed gate cannot be forced open; in a power cut the key-released Manual Release Clutch frees the pinion so the gate slides by hand.

Sequencing is the job of the Control Board: an MCU reads commands, a MOSFET motor driver commutates the motor, and an RF receiver decodes the RF Remote fobs. Position comes from the Limit & Position Sensing block, magnetic limit switches mark fully-open and fully-closed while a shaft encoder counts travel for soft start and stop. Crushing is prevented by the Safety Device Set set: a photocell beam across the opening and pressure-sensitive safety edges that reverse the leaf on contact. A flashing Warning Lamp warns of movement, a keypad allows PIN entry, and the Backup Battery Pack keeps the gate operable through a mains outage.