PACKAGING / PALLETISING PETplanet Insider Vol. 26 No. 10/25 www.petpla.net 26 Reduced engineering eff ort in PET packaging lines Banderole instead of shrink film based on an article by Hans-Joachim Müller, SEW-Eurodrive With its new Propac banderole system, the project Group bundles bottles with reduced material and energy use. Up to 16 axes are coordinated via SEW-Eurodrive’s Movi-C modular automation system, which supports the machine’s modular design and offers advantages in control cabinet design and engineering through preconfigured software modules. Project Automation & Consulting GmbH develops automation solutions for packaging, which are built and distributed by its sister company, Project Service & Produktion GmbH. A core competence is the production of Proband banderole machines, which replace shrink film with banderoles made from plastic or, increasingly, paper-based materials. In the Propac system, bottles are formed into stable multipacks, with an additional applicator adding handles to packs of two, four or six. For several years, the company has been offering banderole machines, initially designed as single-line systems. These first produce twin packs, which are then combined into four- or six-packs in a subsequent step. To achieve high throughput with frequent product changes, the company has now developed a system consisting of multiple banderole units, which attains a higher cycle rate thanks to optimised process technology. The new system, however, required a drive platform capable of coordinating and synchronising up to 16 axes per line. At the same time, the machine concept had to remain modular so that banderole stations could be added or omitted flexibly according to customer requirements. To this end, the plant was realised using SEW-Eurodrive’s latest Movi-C automation system. As a multi-axis solution, Movi-C requires only a single supply unit for up to 32 axes. This also means just one brake resistor, one contactor or one motor protection switch – rather than separate components for each axis as in conventional systems. According to the company, the installation workload is significantly reduced with Movi-C. The controller modules for the individual axes are simply connected to the supply unit via a rail system. This leads to further advantages such as a lower risk of wiring errors and a considerably smaller control cabinet footprint. In addition, braking energy within the multi-axis system can be fed directly into the DC link and reused by another axis, instead of being dissipated as heat in a brake resistor. Electronic cam profile as a standard software module Even more important for Project Automation were the functional advantages of the system, particularly where several gantries must operate in parallel. A gantry is a portal with a gripper: it picks up bottles or primary packs from an infeed conveyor, lifts them, moves them over the banderole station and sets them down. After banderoling, the bottles are not lifted out of the station but are instead quickly lowered by a lifting unit and pushed onto a conveyor by an ejector. All parallel axes are linked to a master axis and synchronised via an electronic cam function within the drive system. Instead of programming the function themselves, Project Automation & Consulting GmbH used SEWEurodrive’s standard Movikit software modules, which are part of the Movi-C automation platform. These cover a wide range of drive functions, from speed control with Movikit Velocity Drive to electronic camming with Movikit MultiMotion Camming, which enables user-defined cam profiles for synchronising complex multi-axis movements. Interfaces to higher-level controllers are also included. www.sew-eurodrive.de The bottles can be collated into multipacks of different sizes using banderoles. (Photo: Project) In this gantry, two twin packs are combined into a four-pack.
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