Food & beverage manufacturers need to quickly adapt their production lines to new consumers’ requirements, as their success depends more and more on strong competitiveness and high efficiency of production processes.
The answer to these needs lies in choosing compact, flexible and environmental sustainable bottling systems and packaging machines, designed for the smart factory and equipped with cutting-edge automation and control systems inspired to Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT).
The tertiary packaging of food and beverage products requires increasingly flexible solutions for improving the handling of containers, avoiding damages during their transport, reducing the format changeover time, increasing the performance and reducing the space.
The new APS 615 ERGON semi-automatic palletizer by SMI results from investments in advanced technical solutions developed to provide users with a simple, easy to use and cost-effective system for a production output up to 15 packs/minute.
Compact and ergonomic structure
The core of the new APS 615 ERGON semi-automatic palletizer is composed of a central structure, where the three Cartesian axis system designed for the pallet formation is positioned.
Main advantages:
- considerable space saving within the production line
- the operator easily and safely performs all the operations related to the system installation, management and maintenance
Functional infeed
The product arrives at the palletizer infeed on a feeding conveyor and is cadenced by a rubber belt; subsequently it is brought by a distancing conveyor into the picking position, where the gripping head picks the pack, individually or grouped, and moves it to the pallet on the ground.
The cyclic repetition of this operation enables to create several palletizing layers.
High level of flexibility
The picking head is equipped with a motor for the product rotation, in order to place the pack on the layer in the position required by the palletizing pattern.
The use of this solution ensures:
- great operational flexibility
- customization possibility, in order to adapt to the needs of format changeover, product changeover and plant layout
- the grip can be lateral, with a suction or magnetic system
Simple management and maintenance
Once the pallet formation has finished, the operator manually removes the full pallet and positions a new empty pallet.
The electrical panel, placed outside the safety guards, is a separate module that is not unwired during the transport and that therefore can be immediately installed at the customer’s plant.
