Turnkey line installed for a dairy snack product has met sleeving style and factory space needs

Customer demands for a modified sleeve design, the same footprint as the original machine, a clever infeed and two tray types were met by a turnkey line from Cama. Secondary and tertiary packaging specialist Cama Group was presented with this multi-faceted challenge by a customer in North America.

Primarily, the customer wanted to replace its existing sleeving machine, and initially wanted to keep the sleeve blank format the same. The new machine had to fit into the current factory space as well as accept products coming from downstream primary packaging at 180 degrees to ‘normal’ infeed. Compounding these challenges was a requirement to package two different tray types flat into sleeves in threes/sixes or standing into shelf-ready carton trays in eights or twelve.

Finally, during the project’s design process, the marketing team at the customer decided it wanted a modified sleeve design similar to that of a leading competitor, which added further complications to the machine’s strategy, especially the closing and gluing processes, which had to be faultless in order to maintain the shelf appeal.

The turnkey line developed by Cama comprises two IF318 top loading sleevers followed by an FW748 wraparound case packer. “Not only have all the functional issues and demands been addressed, but the customer now has a sleever/case packer combination that offers a throughput of some 360 packages per minute,” explains Davide Di Lorenzo, sales engineer manager at Cama Group.

In operation, the products enter a snake conveyor which ‘corrects’ the in-feed orientation. In parallel, carton sleeves are picked from a carton magazine and placed six at a time into a mono-axis shuttle conveyor. The incoming trays are then placed into a racetrack using robots equipped with grippers from Gimatic; designed using specific requirements from Cama’s engineers.

These grippers take hold of the trays at their edges – to avoid any damage to the packs – and stand them in an upright brand-forward position ready for loading into the six pre-formed sleeve packs. Once loaded, hot melt is applied to the lateral flaps, which are then closed using servo-driven pressure plates.

The customer had a specific demand that there were to be no flaps overlapping any of the external front faces. As a result, Cama’s engineers designed a clever answer where a robot head pushes the face panel outwards so that the glued upper flap can be tucked inside, maintaining the all-important smooth outward appearance demanded by the customer.

“This capability is unique to Cama,” Di Lorenzo explains. “The previous supplier tried to modify its machine to achieve this functionality but was unable to attain the necessary quality levels; the machine was simply not doing what the customer wanted.”

Following the secondary packaging, the multipacks are then transported to the case packer that handles a wraparound case format that is constructed from flat blanks. Not only does this save 43% in material use from the previous RSC cases used, but 25% more cases can be stacked in each pallet layer – 5 x 4 compared to the original 4 x 4.

“This application demanded a fully digitalised solution; therefore, we deployed our full Industry 4.0 offering,” explains Di Lorenzo. This was not just on the technology front, but also as a consultant, as a seminar was run for customer engineers and operators to ensure the best use of the equipment.

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www.camagroup.com