Drives & Controls April 2022

44 n MACHINE-BUILDING April 2022 www.drivesncontrols.com Linear transport adds flexibility to pizza- packing machine T he American machine-builder Brenton manufactures end-of-line packaging systems for the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries, specialising in case packing, cartoning, robotic palletising and material- handling. The company, founded more than 30 years ago, is a member of the ProMach group. A US contract packager asked Brenton to take on a challenging case-packing application for frozen pizzas. It needed a machine that could handle random timing in-feeds, as well as 26 different frozen pizza SKUs that were either boxed or shrink-wrapped in plastic. “This application presented a challenge as we had to eliminate change-out flights for different sized products,”explains Brenton’s vice-president of technology, Mike Grinager. “Switching from 10-inch to 15-inch pizzas required time-consuming mechanical adjustments. We also had to deliver a high throughput of 15 cases per minute without product damage. This is complicated by the fact that pizzas are stacked as many as 15 high in variable orientations while they speed down the packaging line.” Brenton decided that these demands necessitated a linear transport system for its M2000 intermittent motion, side-load case- packer machine. “This decision led Brenton to the eXtended Transport System (XTS) from Beckhoff, which we found could adapt to these product changes on the fly,”Grinager reports.“Using XTS, we developed a pitch-less M2000 machine that expertly handles a completely random infeed timing of all pizza shapes, orientations and product variants, including display-ready and bulk packaging.” The upgraded machine includes 5.5m of XTS track with 12“movers”to control the product infeed. The track combines linear motor characteristics with the constantly cycling movers, which can create clamping forces as they travel. Two synchronised movers, working together, grip the pizza stacks contained in buckets with a predefined force and stabilise them for fast, secure transport to the case packaging steps. “That’s the beauty of this machine – it takes a stack of 15 shrink-wrapped circular pizzas and can quickly adapt to an infeed of pizzas already in square packaging – all with minimal changeover time,”Grinager says. It compensates for different infeed timings because the movers can buffer products in front of the load station to give other production processes extra time if needed. The linear transport system“greatly reduces jams and downtime as it moves perfectly stacked pizzas into cartons,”according to Grinager.“None of this was possible with other systems we evaluated.”The first application had to handle heavy payloads because of the weight of the tall stacks of pizzas. Therefore, Brenton integrated a GFX guidance system from HepcoMotion to accommodate the higher payloads. The packaging machine can carton up to 41 different SKUs and up to 27 cases – equivalent to 140 frozen pizzas – per minute. It can also implement up to 26 different pack patterns, including complex display-ready patterns at a throughput of 12.5 cases a minute. According to Grinager, it can do the work of three conventional case-packing machines. By eliminating many of the change-out steps, Brenton reduced the typical downtime for the remaining infeed changeovers from around 30 minutes down to five. It also saved at least 200 hours of engineering time for the machine’s infeed section and reduced complexity dramatically by being able to eliminate about 100 parts from the infeed, such as chains, flights and rotation systems. Brenton has since received a third order from the contract packaging company and is quoting for additional machines for other customers. The new technology is opening up new projects for the OEM. “XTS supports many newmachine designs for projects that we might have passed on previously,”Grinager says.“We now have in our reach new concepts that are faster, more flexible and can reduce machine footprint by as much as 50%.”Brenton is also looking at using a hygienic versions of the linear transport system for washdown applications, as well as considering Beckhoff’s XPlanar levitating transport system for challenging material-handling requirements. n A US packaging machine-builder has adopted a linear transport system for a pizza-packing machine that gives added flexibility to product infeed and makes changeovers much faster. The redesigned machine also has a much smaller footprint than before. A series of buckets holds pizzas as the linear transport system takes them around a 180-degree curve, gripping and stabilising the stacks as they move. Image: Brenton