THICK AND THIN
Above all, bag-opening suction cups need to be able to handle differences in material thickness—from thin plastic bags to the thicker rubbery bags.
For thin materials, suction cups like PIAB’s F15 provide a convenient solution that prevents the bag from being pulled into the airflow hole.
This cup features special cleats on the lip to allow the air to flow into the complete lip area—making sure that the entire lip is put to work, rather than just the part located closest to the airflow hole.
By not being concentrated around the airflow hole and covering the largest are possible, the F15 cup helps maintain an even bag-opening process flow throughout production.
As for handling thicker materials, PIAB’s U15-3 suction cup—designed to prevent the bag from covering the airflow hole with a wide, enforced lip—offers an equally effective solution.
One of the machine-building companies to have made effective use of PIAB’s innovative compressed-air technologies is the Longmont, Colo.-based BluePrint Automation Group, which specializes in automated secondary packaging solutions for flexible and other hard-to-handle packages.
Finding itself challenged to find a reliable solution for picking up plastic bags for one of its clients’ packaging applications—securely gripping plastic bags of bread and loading them into boxes for shipping—BluePrint quickly realized that standard suction cups were not up to the task, as evidenced by dropped products and frequent machine stoppages.
“The handling of plastic bags is a difficult packaging application that we specialize in,” recalls BluePrint’s research-and-development manager R.M. Hoveling, “because we need to handle flexible material that is constantly shifting and moving.”
According to Hoveling, BluePrint tested a flexible new vacuum solution with its HVP packaging machine—combining PIAB’s P6010 vacuum pump with the Cruise Control (PCC) option and the BL40-3P polyurethane suction cup.
This successful combination of decentralized vacuum technology allowed BluePrint to reinforce its position as one of the
world’s leading suppliers of plastic bag-handling machinery, according to Hoveling, who expects BluePrint to partner up with PIAB in the future to co-develop other innovative machines incorporating vacuum handling technology.
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