Recently, a Swedish manufacturer of tubes for the food, pharmaceutical and personal-care industries installed an industrial vacuum conveyor based on COAX technology to transport plastic granules—enabling its conveyor system to achieve higher performance and consume 25 per cent less energy than with the previously-used conventional pump.
As products move through the production line at high speeds, accurate handling is a must—with smaller items such as blister-packs, candies, etc. requiring a reliable grip.
In such applications, the challenge is to find a flexible solution with fast changeover capabilities for facilitating not only numerous inherent production advantages, but also reducing energy consumption.
Because the energy-efficient COAX cartridges are smaller than the size of a pencil, and made of extremely lightweight materials, they are ideal for the rapidly moving robotic systems used for applications such as pick-and-place, to use an example.
Because they eliminate tubing between the vacuum and point-of-use, the cartridges significantly improve initial flow—enabling a quicker and more secure grip for suction cups and faster performance for the machinery.
This also applies to difficult-to-handle products like plastic bags and porous, uneven surfaces like cardboard.
Recently, Spanish food-packaging products manufacturer Filneapack, based in Barcelona, reaped numerous benefits after integrating COAX cartridges into its bag handling machinery—incorporating a multistage vacuum ejector directly at the point-of-use.
The decentralized solution helped ensure a strong grip on the moving flexible packages, according to the company’s engineering manager Xavier Plana, while significantly reducing the amount of production line downtime.
“The cartridges allowed us to improve how quickly and reliably the machine could adapt to a change of product on the line,” explains Plana. “We were very impressed with how economical our machines could be when utilizing the new technology.”
In another recent application, French company Joulin Aero—a leading manufacturer of automatic vacuum gripping technology—wanted to offer its customers a more versatile vacuum gripping system that could save on time and cost.
SURE GRIP
By integrating COAX cartridges multistage vacuum cartridges into its grippers, the company was able to develop a new gripping system for palletizing applications, called ICV, which can reliably handle a multitude of products in varying sizes, formats and packaging materials.
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