By Jim Montague, Executive Editor
MANY MACHINES that used to be bolted to their various plant floors seem to be growing legs and walking around. Spooky? Not really, because this is just another manifestation of the flexible, modular, mobile, do-more-with-less engineering thats becoming standard operating procedure in U.S. manufacturing. Many machines are taking their capabilities on the road, or at least elsewhere in their factories and production lines.
Germany-based OEM Emkon Systemtechnik Projektmanagement GmbH recently wanted to build a mobile palletizer that could be moved from one line to another, and integrated into production flows quickly and easily. Our users needed a small-footprint palletizer that could drive one production line one day, and then drive another line the next day, says Andreas Dittrich, Emkons sales and marketing director. However, to achive this goal, the company required flexible controls that could synchronize quickly with a new production environment.
Consequently, Emkons PZ 1-K Android series palletizing unit was designed and developed to be a self-contained, turnkey, roller-mounted machine (See Figure 1 below). It can be used as a single, double, and multi-pallet station palletizer. A standard vacuum gripper takes individual, conveyor-fed products, and packs them singly or grouped in up to six pallet spaces, and stacks these for palletization according to a specified layout. It allows consistently flexible different palletizing layouts and the introduction of slipsheets.
We sought to make PZ 1-K as flexible as possible, and so it allows operators to put seven or eight products on the same pallet, says Dittrich. The slip sheet unit on the side of PZ 1-K is a new feature in palletizing that lets users put a sheet of paper between layers as needed.
|
FIGURE 1: Have Palletizer, Will Travel |