Project Overview
The southern China-based producer of brewing free-lance brands is looking for ways to expand its product line of one of its popular gift-wrapped liquor products to capture the market and stabilize its brand image more efficiently.
White spirit company production manager hopes to have the entire line of equipment manufactured and installed by the third quarter; this will avoid the risk of contracting the covid-19 disease in the fourth quarter when the temperature drops while ensuring that it is in time to keep up with the peak Chinese New Year sales season in the fourth quarter.
Objective1:Reduce manual forming carton involvement
At present, the outer packaging box of white wine bottles belongs to the gift box, the box comes with a portable rope on both sides, according to the conventional carton forming machine is prone to failure, or suction cups absorb the wrong position of the box; another is that the box belongs to the square but the height is relatively high carton, the conventional design mechanism for tape sealing will have a large margin of error, affecting product sales.
Hennopack solution
We observed the carton printing factory supplying cardboard and found that the portable rope will not move easily without human pulling. From this we still use the horizontal storage of cardboard, only the number of cardboard added each time must not be too much; after all, the higher the stack, the tilt of the stack of portable rope will increase, while easy to pull the rope activity, affecting the back of the box molding.
The second is that, due to the existence of errors in the fixed position of the rope, the uncertainty of the stacked cardboard sliding rope. We adopt the structure design of servo motor driven forming, which can effectively avoid the vibration caused by the suction cup cylinder structure leading to the rope activity and solve the influence of the box forming.
Then is for the tape sealing uneven situation, we use the synchronous chain conveying propulsion mode design, in the upper and lower parts of the carton uniform force, can make the carton forming regular, tape sealing error is small.
Objective2:Bottle case packer system multip-SKU capacity and flexibility
At present, the customer’s product packaging is not only this one hot liquor gift; there are also other grades of product specifications; the customer hopes that the equipment on this one line can meet the application of multiple products or later upgrade of hot products – such as bottle shape change,case size changes, etc.
Hennopack solution
1. The design of the carton forming machine is still based on the size of boxes often used in the liquor industry, and the mechanism can be adjusted accordingly when replacing different sizes of cartons.
2. Since most of the current liquor industry uses glass bottles for filling; there is friction between bottles and bottles, which is easy to block with the side baffle friction during transmission; we have chosen a servo divider for bottle quantitative divider transmission, this way even if the bottle appearance changes at a later stage, it is still easy to separate bottles and smooth transmission.
3. For the cartoning packer machine, the current production capacity of hot liquor reaches 12,000 bottles per hour, and each carton is loaded with only 6 bottles, which means that it will be up to 35 cases per minute. After consideration, we use a sprocket type structure as the transmission mechanism and the bottle gripper adopts a modular design, when replacing different product packaging, we only need to carry out modular gripper replacement.
Objective 3:Reduced line downtime and two line palletizing in one station
In another workshop, there was another conveyor line outputting cartons that were stacked by a conventional palletizer, but due to the large size of the previous equipment design, it took up a lot of space and also required frequent maintenance. This outdated machinery was costing the customer a lot of time and kept the order production from being completed on time at all times.
At the same time, this has the question that line stacking location was in the newly launched hot product line workshop, and the customer wanted the two lines to share the same workstation for stacking. It also wanted a new solution with less annual maintenance and easier recipe changes.
Hennopack Solutions
Using KUKA robots with minimal mechanical parts and 80-100,000-hours Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) significantly improved reliability compared to the customer’s previous mechanical solution.
KUKA robots have always focused on heavy-duty design; based on the existing line carton incoming speed of 25 boxes per minute, the new production line speed is 35 boxes per minute, the total efficiency of 60 boxes per minute. We use a pallet dispenser machine to supply pallets in two stacking positions, and the robot is installed in the middle of the two stacking stations. Depending on the number of pallets per layer and the way they are arranged, we decided to use a way of grabbing 15 boxes at a time to achieve the efficiency beat.
While switching products, you only need to select the corresponding recipe in the human interface(HMI of HENNO packaging control system to complete automatic product palletizing changing. In addition, the human interface can always observe the occurrence of faults and quickly find the source of the problem to solve the problem, which saves most of the precious time for the field engineers and ensures timely production.
Sequence of Operations
The custom servo opener first forms the carton and seals the tape at the bottom, which flows to the next station, where the hand-held rope is pulled apart and put into the manual.
The servo channel divider divides the glass bottles into three channels according to the set arrangement and converges the products to the boxer gripping position. The bottom carton enters 7 cartons continuously, when the cartons are in place, the carton will automatically descend to grab the products of 7 boxes, and when it lifts to the top position, the products will be divided into 7 groups of the same spacing arrangement according to the spacing between the cartons, and then descend to place the glass bottle inside the cartons.
Once full cases transport to the downstream case sealer and then transport to the palletising station. Arriving at the palletizing station, the products are arranged in the established arrangement of products. When the robot receives the signal that the product arrangement is complete, it will grab the cartons between the two lines according to the priority principle, and place them on the corresponding pallet a. Once enough cartons have been stacked, the loaded pallet will flow to the cache conveyor line and the empty pallet will be supplied to the corresponding palletizing station at the same time and the cycle works.
