The following content originally appeared in issue 135 of Beverage Innovation, which you can subscribe to here.
Whether multi lane conveyors, accumulation conveyors, air conveyors or belt conveyors, internal transport systems have to meet the industry pressures for greater speed, reduced energy consumption, improved flexibility and more, as Claire Rowan discovers.
Meeting conveying challenges
Intralox is innovating to address the challenges of back pressure for lighterweight containers, smooth transfers, and reduced product footprint plus greater efficiencies, as Intralox container team and packaging team business development analyst Yan Liang reveals.
What are the main challenges to achieving consistent smooth transport of soft drinks packs in plant?
For mass product handling, in particular, managing back pressure is an issue. As a result of the continuous ‘light weighting’ of primary containers, today’s PET bottles and cans are much more fragile and prone to damage and tipping than ever before. As a result, much greater care has to be taken in the engineering and design of both the conveyor system and materials.
For product transfer, maintaining smooth and continuous transfers is paramount to managing both minimal backpressure as well as product tipping. As with all modern conveying, line controls are very important for monitoring line conditions in real time, to allow adjustments to be made to the system and ensure continuous throughput.
For full cases – ie once the containers are in a case – the same basic issues as mentioned above are important. However, methods for managing them are different. Managing backpressure, case orientation changes in continuous motion, as well as case quality are some of the major concerns. Again, transfers are a major consideration especially due to the trend in the beverage industry for creating smaller secondary packaging sizes such as four, six or eight packs. Intralox has spent a great deal of time in
developing new technologies for small pack transfers that gently and smoothly transfer packs from one conveyor to another without tripping or disrupting case orientation.
How has Intralox innovated to improve the performance of internal conveying systems?
The ARB Switch S7050 and ARB Turner-Divider S7050 are the latest additions to Intralox’s Activated Roller Belt (ARB) collection. Both offer turning and laning of products at high speeds, accommodation of pack changes, and minimised downtime and maintenance.
This equipment addresses new market demands for flexibility in production lines, low packaging material costs, and optimal product handling. Benefits include:
• Soft product handling that enables flexible layout design;
• Efficient switching of products at up to 500 packages per minute
• The ability to turn, switch, and transfer multiple sizes of retail-ready products on the same equipment.
The ARB Turner Divider S7050 is able to turn and square packs through zero or ninety degrees; divide packages into one, two or three lanes; plus reject and bypass, all on one piece of equipment in a shorter footprint than traditional technology – all this at speeds of up to 300 cases per minute.
Multi-lane accumulation
C-Trak, a bespoke conveyor manufacturer for the food and beverage industry, has recently created a multiple lane conveyor accumulator designed with side guides.
The brief included the need to handle various sized glass bottles filled with mineral water, which were manually loaded on to a plastic slat conveyor. The bottles needed to be held in place by numerous positioned stainless steel opening and closing barriers that could be released on demand.
C-Trak’s solution transferred the bottles along the lanes to a secondary conveyor fitted with removable plastic loading trays, where they are accumulated until required before being switched to an adjoining multi-lane conveyor.
This application was designed with flexibility in mind. It can be adapted to handle various sized bottles plus the packing boxes, which can be conveyed ready for labelling.
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