| Screw Actuators Solve a Bag-positioning Riddle
 Flaws in bag consistency make it difficult for this bulk bag-filling system to position bags accurately. Screw actuators meet the challenge.
A bulk-bag filling system from Thiele Technologies (www.thieletech.com) is used to package anything from pet food to salt to dirt. Bags—either multiwall paper or woven polyethylene or polypropylene—move from a hopper holding several hundred bags to a pair of staging trays, one bag per tray. From these two staging trays, a vacuum picking device picks the two bags and presents them to the transfer belt that brings them to the net-weigh filling station.
Because the bags move through the system at a pretty good clip, about 35/min, the bags must be precisely positioned in their trays at the point when the vacuum pick-up cups contact them. Four electric screw actuators from Tolomatic (www.tolomatic.com) ensure this placement precision.
At the root of this positioning challenge is a lack of consistency in the bags being purchased by Thiele’s customers. The Tolomatic screw actuators compensate for variations in bag dimensions. “The actuators automatically adjust each bag in its tray to compensate for variations in bag length and width,” says Thiele’s Jon Gifford. “The design tolerances for positioning the tops of the bags is only plus-or-minus 0.031 inches, and now we can maintain that precision even when bag dimensions vary...”
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Automating a Beverage Line
The challenge for Innoventor Solutions Inc., a St. Louis engineering firm, was to design an automated beverage packaging system that integrated vision with motion digital input/output points (I/O).
Previously, their customer had installed labels on beverage cans by hand and sorted them manually. This created a production bottleneck, and increased the risk of motion injuries for employees. The per-piece average cycle time for the new system had to be 1.4 seconds. Because the labels on the cans have more than 150 possible color schemes and background patterns, an additional challenge was finding and reading the bar code on each can.
The solution required tight integration among three cameras, three stepper motors, and 50 industrial digital I/O sensors and actuators. Also, the control system had to be capable of implementing complex vision algorithms. “We needed a PAC (programmable automation controller) that had the functionality of a PC (personal computer) and, at the same time, the reliability of a programmable logic controller (PLC),” says Innoventor Chief Engineer Sam Hammond...
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Automation World Readers Voice Innovation Needs and Concerns
In October, Automation World conducted an Internet survey asking readers about their feelings regarding automation innovation. Almost 100 responded, sharing insights, concerns and their outlook for the future. Here are some of the responses compiled by Contributing Editor Alex Anderson.
What are the top technical or business practice innovations of the past five to 10 years that have had the most impact on your job? And why?
“As a small-business owner competing against larger companies, the advances in CAD/CAM (computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing) technology have made the software more affordable for smaller operations like mine,” says Michael Jarrell, Owner of Carmel Valley, Calif.-based Emtech LLC. “This computer technology has allowed my company to offer this as a supplemental service that has given me the recognition from buyers that may have overlooked me in the past. It has also allowed my company the ability to machine parts more effectively and efficiently.”
Jordan Ehst, of Lebanon, Pa.-based Automatic Farm Systems, tells us that lower-cost “microbrick” programmable logic controllers (PLCs) have been important for his company. “They have allowed us to move from a mess of relays to a flexible, potent controller that easily allows expandability and on-site modification. It also allows us to automate small systems that in the past would have required...”
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