Consumer Product Assembly & Packaging - High Speed Tube Packaging
DMW Automation engineers and staff personnel designed a new custom automation solution to replace existing equipment that was too slow, not accurate and could not handle new multi-product packaging requirements.
Overview
- Location: Southeast
- Industry: Consumer
- Products/Services: Tubes Packaging
- Primary SIC Code: 2834 / 2833
- Annual Sales: $100+ Million
- Technology: Continuous Motion
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| Tube serpentine accumulation and blister loading station. |
Situation
A large pharmaceutical/consumer products manufacturer approached DMW Automation to develop a solution to feed, orient, and place tubes into existing blister packaging machines at speeds up to 550 parts per minute.
The customer had existing automated equipment in place, but this equipment was limited by:
- Production speed capability
- The variety of tubes that could be fed into the equipment at one time, and
- The lack of accuracy when placing the tubes in the blisters
The customer wanted new automated equipment that would process a possible combination of 1, 2, or 3 tubes with various color labels, and to place them into blisters while staying perfectly synchronized with the blister machines.
This solution also had to be designed within an existing amount of floor space and be thoroughly tested at our facility, without the blister machines.
Action
Our personnel traveled to the customer facility to evaluate and examine their existing equipment on the plant floor while taking space measurements.
Our engineers designed an automated system using our existing high speed Continuous Motion expertise. In order to do so we first developed a prototype for a serpentine feeding system.
Our solution combined the integration of 3rd party centrifugal bowl feeding systems with serpentine accumulation and encoded servo-motor driven feed wheels, resulting in a totally flexible system that could be electronically changed between various packaging configurations.
After fabrication and assembly, the machine was tested at our facility without the customer’s blister pack machinery present. We ran simulations to test the equipment to ensure it would correctly integrate with existing machinery and with the existing machine controls. We then conducted Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) with the customer present and received their approval to ship the equipment.
We shipped the equipment and installed it on site, successfully integrating it with the existing blister machines. We also integrated the two control systems together, all within the allotted equipment down time window.
Results
The integration of our automated solution resulted in a 100% increase in line speed and a 40% increase in total line efficiency on each of the two systems installed. Operators are only required to refill the feeding systems hoppers. This equipment has been regularly run in a 24/7 mode, when required by production, for the past three years.
For more information about DMW Automation's success stories and our custom automation equipment and systems services, please call us at 847-437-0665, or email us at sales@dmwautomation.com.
