September 2020

40 n FOOD AND BEVERAGE September 2020 www.drivesncontrols.com Egg-packing machines deliver cracking performance E very day, Britons consume 36 million eggs. A major supplier of eggs to UK supermarkets wanted to automate their packing operations to reduce the number of eggs that were being damaged, to increase throughput, and to reduce the amount of manual handling involved, thus cutting costs and increasing safety. The company commissioned Gloucester- based CKF Systems to design and build a robotic packing and palletising system which was installed to work with existing Moba egg-handling machines at two sites that fill cartons of various sizes and materials and close their lids. Previously the eggs were then fed to manual packing station. The new system feeds the filled and closed cartons onto an out-feed conveyor – the set-up of which is determined by current production requirements. A vision system verifies that the use-by date has been included and that the lid is closed. If the lid is not closed or the date is incorrect or missing, the product is rejected. Automating this process means faulty products are removed swiftly from the line, preventing them from reaching the customer and ensuring the quality of the end-product. If the product passes the test, the egg carton is transferred onto a collation infeed conveyor that transfers and orientates the boxes correctly to be conveyed to a box splitter. When two six-egg cartons are joined and need to be split, the box splitter does so using a blade without damaging the eggs. It can cut either pulp or plastic cartons. A product spacer uses pneumatic stop gates to ensure there is a preset amount of space between the egg boxes or groups of boxes to allow for pack orientation or for repositioning into the correct lane. “We encountered a number of issues through the planning and implementation of this project due to the variety in pack materials,” recalls CKF project engineer, Chris Young. “Different materials behave differently on the conveyors. It was absolutely vital that the system could handle different materials, so we used a combination of belt materials and surface textures to overcome this issue.” Palletising A low back-pressure chain roller conveyor moves the egg cartons through to a robotic sorting collation conveyor. A modular belt conveyor encoder is used to track the carton positions, enabling the robot to reposition them to create the required collation. The system uses an ABB IRB1200 sorting robot which is programmed to arrange the cartons of eggs into specific patterns on the conveyors as required by the packing robot. The type of carton and the containers they are being packed into determine the collation pattern the cartons are placed in by the sorting robot. Once the cartons are positioned on the sorting modular belt conveyors, they are transported onto the collation conveyor unit. The robot orientates the cartons correctly. If the spacing isn’t suitable for the robot, a collation servodrive uses pneumatic stops to ensure that the correct number of cartons with the right spacing are fed onto the conveyor ready to be picked by the packing robot. There are two product streams providing versatility in the patterns available to the packing robot. The type of carton and the container the cartons are packed into determine the number and pattern of the cartons. Once the egg cartons have been grouped into the required pattern, the robot picks a group of cartons from either stream and places them into the appropriate container for that run. In the case of bulk containers, they are then removed by a forklift so they can be transported to the supermarket ensuring that customers have access to fresh eggs. Alternatively, if cardboard display cases are being packed, once full, they are discharged automatically from the robot cell via a conveyor system and transferred for palletising. The new packing and palletising systems are said to be running smoothly and to have improved their egg producer’s operations “dramatically”. n One of the UK’s leading egg producers has installed robotic packaging and palletising machines at two of its sites, increasing its throughput and cutting its costs. Robots now ensure that the eggs are packed and palletised faster and with less damage