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After visiting more than one hundred manufacturing facilities I’m always surprised by the lack of bottle unscramblers being used in bottling and packaging production lines
After asking if they would consider adding a bottle unscrambler most of the times I’m met with resistant with this claims:
Before disregarding this idea I would argue:
A good bottle unscrambler would changeover faster than a capper and having your bottles being fed by a machine and not a human will increase your production offsetting x 10 cost of setup
2.Changeovers would take too long
If you document your changeovers and use the indicators changeover should take no more than 10-15 minutes
3.It’s a large investment
If you have one person working 8 hours per day feeding bottles a 35K bottles unscrambler would pay for itself in 1.5 years (just on labor costs), if you have 2 persons the payoff is less than 9 months
4. I don’t have space
There are some places where you can simply not add any more equipment, otherwise the effort to put in the machine will pay for it self quickly
If you are running production at least 30 hours per week at 30 bpm or more you should seriously consider adding a bottle unscrambler to your production line, not only will you save in labor costs but your production will increase by being more efficient on your bottle feeding.
Bottle unscramblers don’t go to the restroom, chat with their buddies or work slower because of a bad hangover.
One of my favorite manufacturing quotes by Henry Ford:
"If you need a machine and don't buy it, you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don't have it."
When a customer buys a machine, a production line or a project: bottle unscrambler machine, conveyors, overflow or piston inline filler machine, inline capper machine, chuck capper, rotary tables, bottle gap transfers, bottle labelers, etc, all settings are made in our facilities to ensure the proper functioning of all systems. Once installed the machines in the final customer facility, the behavior of the production line can vary and obtain undesirable results in some systems, as a resulted to do a little adjusments to resolve these issues. The reason for this: little variations in the new environment: light, temperature, voltage, current, stability. quality of containers and caps, etc.
Another variant of this same matter is when the customer decides to run new formats of bottles and / or caps, being necessary then, readjustments of settings. In addition, there may be cases of variations in the quality of the caps and containers, although they remain the same, they could affect the initial configurations of the line, even when the production line takes many hours with a stable behavior.
I intend in this article to give you a guide to solve these problems.
Some number of calls for technical service, are related to the mismatch of the sensitivity of the sensors, responsible for counting the inputs and outputs of bottles in the filling area. Next, a video of how to solve this problem, whenever necessary.
Of course, problems may occur and one of the most common issues concerning to the GI 3300 Automatic Overflow Bottle Filler, is because the conveyor is not working. This may stop working for several reasons:
When the function "Clean in place" is activated and the machine is turned off, this function is still active when turning the overflow inline filler machine on, preventing the conveyor and pump from working. Therefore, it is very important to check that function status.
In order to work, the machine needs to have a logic, that logic is given by a system of sensors (proximity sensors and bottles input and bottles output sensors). In order the conveyor to work, the proximity sensor must be activated, which indicates the filler nozzles are up. For this, make sure the sensor is on. If the sensor is not, it can be due to two reasons: a) the sensor is not having contact with the main bar of the overflow filler machine, the sensor has been moved because it has been unscrewed by the movement of the nozzles , or b) the sensor is badly connected electrically, this prevents the PLC from receiving the signal from the sensor, therefore the PLC can not send the signal to the conveyor motor to turn it on. This sensor is connected to one of the inputs of the PLC (the PLC is the brain of the machine) and the logic of the operation is as follows: while the PLC is receiving a signal from the sensor, it will activate 2 outputs connected to the conveyor's driver. As a consequence, if the sensor is not properly connected to the input of the PLC (see the electrical drawing to know the number of the PLC input) the PLC will not be able to action the conveyor.
One of the productivity factors that is frequently overlooked by companies has to do with bottlenecks at the beginning of the production lines running plastic bottles.
Often companies focus solely on automating the filling, capping, and labeling processes while relying on manual labor to load the bottles to the line. While this may be an acceptable setup initially, it may quickly become unsustainable on the long run, because of unreliability and the potential impact it will have on the company's overall production capacity.
Adding an automatic bottle unscrambler to the line will significantly improve production and utilization of your available resources.
As a manufacturer of inline capper and chuck cappers we have dealt with thousands of different bottles and caps and the reality is that capping is one the hardest part of of the bottling process.
The main factors to take into consideration for better bottle capping results are:
VIDEO INLINE
you have the threads of the container picking up in different random positions so if the tolerances and/or the design is a bit tight or not forgiving you get cross threaded caps.For speeds above 200 bpm it’s the only effective solution
VIDEO CHUCK
Keep in mind each bottle and cap needs to be looked into, studied and tested to make sure it will work properly for your required speed, torque and consistency.
In the packaging business, specifically about bottle inline process (filling, capping, bottle handling), it is important that the machines be designed under fast, tool less, handy and easy concepts in order to get more profibility of invesment.
Talking about capping process, Acasi Machinery has developed an inline capper machine, model trucap. This machine can be a simple tightener machine, or of course, you can get a complete automation system add a cap chute and a cap feeder, depending on the size of cap and bottle geometry.
In a world where time is money, it is necessary to have a machine with tool less, easy, handy and fast changing over and adjusting concept, depending on whether you need to replace wear parts or need to adjust to a disk or belt parameters with the machine running. That's why Trucap capper machine by Acasi Machinery has a Value Added.
We are going to talk first, about replace process on parts susceptable to wear. At this point, it is important that you are able to change a spare part in a minimun time and minimum simple hand adjusments in order to reduce a machine stop time. Please take a look at the pictures on the bottom where I pretend to show a sequence of steps to uninstall a disk assembly:
After many hours of operation, the orange disk on a spindle capping systems are susceptible to wear. Therefore, eventually you will need to replace these orange disks. Just removing a pin, you can uninstall a complete capping disk or spindle assembly.
On the other hand, it is very common that you will need to change the physical values set on your capper machine depending on certain cap geometry or even depending on different bottles diameters. If you need to switch to different cap or bottle, could be a high undesired wasted of time, if you do not have the right machine. Please take a look at a short video clicking this link.
Trucap capper machine has an easy and handy solution, by using front knobs with position indicator for easy setup, to adjust the height and width of the gripper belts which keep the bottles in the right and stable position for capper process. Besides, the front doors have convenient holes, in order to avoid opening doors, and to adjust the width of the capping disks or spindles, with the purpose to get the right set for your cap.
When should you buy an overflow filler:
Over flow filling has been used has been used to fill low viscosity liquids for many decades, if it’s used for the right product and a correct set up it will give you a very accurate fill
The overflow filler will give you the fill level by the depth off the return tube inside the container, once the product reaches these tube It will go through the tube instead of continuing to fill your container. If you reach the overflow tube in four seconds and leave it filling for more time the fill level in theory will be the same, keeping this in mind when you set-up an overflow machine will help you understand that you only need to fill for enough time so all the nozzles have overflown. All fill nozzles will not fill at the exact same rate and it won’t matter, if you leave the machine filling for enough time eventually all containers will fill and you will get an even cosmetic fill.
We talk about a cosmetic fill because the machine will not know what volume it is filling it will only do it by height so if the bottles you purchase have an internal volume that it’s different the machine will always feel the same height but the larger bottle will have more product than the smaller bottle by volume.
There are many settings but you can have an overflow filler some machines Have the capability of filling at different speeds at different times, this is very useful specially on larger containers because you will be able to fill at very high speeds at the beginning and slow down at the end to avoid splashing, if you don’t have this option you will have to fill all the container at the highest speed on which the machine will not splash.
Most nozzle designs on overflow liquid filler will drip, not because they are defective but because the get wet and when they come out there is product on the outer tube, so when the nozzles come up and they drip while the containers are moving you will get product on the outside of your bottles. An easy solution for this is a drip-tray that most companies offer.
By far, the biggest limitation of an overflow liquid filler is not being able to fill thick products, or high viscosity products. Different companies offer different solutions and some companies like to take on projects of higher viscosity than other. If you plan to fill a product thicker than water, make sure you get written guarantees.
The main problem with filling high viscosity products is that the product will have to overflow, so if it’s to thick instead of overflowing it creates an internal pressure inside the container that is stronger than the top seal and instead of overflowing the product comes up and spills from the top of the containers, trust me, not fun!!!
There are different nozzle designs that can help for thicker products, larger overflow, assisted overflow with vacuum, suck-back, etc.. Make sure the nozzle will work for your product and container.
After all’s been said, overflow fillers are a great solution for thin low viscosity products and can be pushed to work some thicker products
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