Omron Motion Control helps to make sleeving automatic

When developing a novel machine to automate the placing of card sleeves around trays of pre-packed food, Keymac Packaging Systems, a leading innovator in food packaging equipment, found that Omron motion controllers offered exactly the combination of performance, versatility and value for money that the project needed.

Packs of food with card sleeves are much in demand by major retailers, but applying those sleeves has, until now, been an inconvenient and labour-intensive manual process. To address this situation, Keymac Packaging Systems – a new UK company whose staff has extensive experience and expertise in packaging – decided that the time was right to develop a versatile and affordable automatic pack sleever.

To satisfy the demands of users in the food industry, machine must be able to handle oval, round and rectangular packs in a variety of sizes, and it must be capable of accepting the packs either continuously back-to-back, or presented at random intervals. It must also be compatible with full sleeves, band sleeves and narrow watchstrap sleeves. Finally, it must have a high enough throughput capacity to match the output of a typical food production line.

Meeting these requirements meant that the machine would need a sophisticated motion control system. While surveying the motion control market to find a suitable product, Keymac’s engineers quickly discovered that many expensive and/or excessively complicated solutions were available.

Finding a powerful and versatile yet easy to use motion controller at a realistic price was much more of a challenge, but his challenge was successfully met when the company evaluated the new Trajexia motion control products from Omron.

A modular system, Trajexia supports up to 16 servo axes with independent position, speed or torque control for each axis. In addition, inverter drives and remote I/O can also be added. Its powerful software is designed to make programming intuitive and straightforward, and it features an advanced 32-bit digital signal processor (DSP) allowing it to handle demanding motion control tasks, including electronic camming.

“The Trajexia controller gave us exactly what we need technically,” said Mike Bradley, Keymac’s Managing Director, “and it is also very competitively priced. In addition, we were very happy with the idea of using equipment from Omron as we’ve always had good experiences with the company and its products.”

“The Omron equipment and, in particular the Trajexia controller, has played a big part in helping us to achieve our objectives of producing a machine which is electrically and mechanically simple, easy to maintain and attractively priced, while offering the high standards of performance and reliability which food manufacturers rightly expect,” said Mike Bradley.

The first of the Keymac Autosleeve K101 machines are now in service, and are consistently achieving throughput rates of 60 packs per minute, even with the largest packs. This compares very favourably with typical manual sleeving rates of around 40 packs per minute with two or even three operators working simultaneously.

 “Our new machine is generating a lot of interest in the food industry, where potential users are quick to understand the big cost savings it can offer,” said Mike Bradley, “so we’re confident that we’ll be building many more of them. Which means, of course, we’ll be using a lot more automation products from Omron!”