TRAPO: Special complete line competence for the food industry

Whether coffee powder, whole beans or coffee pods – the consumer’s decision is a matter of taste. The manufacturer’s task leaves no freedom of choice: all coffee products must be packaged precisely and under maximum performance.

Task

The manufacturer’s task leaves no freedom of choice: all coffee products must be packaged precisely and at maximum throughput – according to a predefined list of priorities.

Solution

Flexible, powerful and compact: The high-performance packaging line implemented by TRAPO GmbH closes the gap between filling and storage. In terms of structure and conveyor technology, it is designed to fit perfectly into the existing infrastructure of the plant and machine hall on site.

The line is visualized via TIM, the TRAPO Intelligent Managementsystem – faults are indicated directly. This ensures production according to priority list. The picker and palletizing lines are integrated into a web-based ERP system.

Four high-performance picker lines

Four extremely compact, flexible picker lines, each with two industrial robots. Two pickers carton up to 120 form-fill-seal bags per minute. Four form-fill-seal machines fill up to 105 form-fill-seal bags per minute, sealing the continuous film, filling the coffee, cutting the bag and finally sealing it.

Conveyor belts direct the tubular bags to the TRAPO picker lines. There, two carton erectors distribute the cartons to the four picker lines. The previously erected packaging unit is transported by a conveyor belt that runs in the opposite direction to the picker line. Coffee units from 25 g to 1,000 g are packaged.

Each of the picker lines has an upstream camera for determining the position of the tubular bags fed in. This detects the position of the tubular bags on the conveyor belt and transmits it to the robot controller.

The first picker fills the carton up to 70%, the downstream picker fills the carton exactly to 100%. The packing patterns specified by the customer are followed so that the cartons reach the required fill level.

Packing cartons

The fully packed cartons are transported onward via conveyor belts. Behind the picker cell, the full carton is labeled with a label from an on-site labeler.

This is followed by quality control by scales – accurate to ten grams, documentation of the closing of the carton and preparation for palletizing.

Three high-performance TRAPO HLP 6000 palletizers

In case of maintenance or malfunction, lines are diverted to the respective other palletizer; high-priority products are always running, thus ensuring the customer always has high availability of his prioritized production lines. This safeguarding is based on highly-complex calculation models for which different failure scenarios have been run through: The products with priority 1 have priority, regardless of this, when a palletizer is serviced, ideally all other products must also continue to run.

Finished cartons are fed to the high-performance palletizers via eight filling lines. Unrecognized labels or defective packages are automatically rejected. Each palletizer is preceded by a parallel kinematic system that forms exact layers at up to 40 cartons per minute.

The TRAPO Pack palletizing tool implements different layer patterns according to the customer’s specifications and technical requirements, thus guaranteeing the customer a high degree of variability in their future products and associated layer patterns which the customer can subsequently create without the assistance of the TRAPO team.

The uniform product distribution enables the buffering of the cartons by type with fully-automatic distribution and by means of an upstream buffering station. Uniform product distribution to the respective palletizers is ensured via several lane distributions. To ensure that the palletizers are always supplied with product, there is a station with three levels and five lines per level.

The palletizing lines are each equipped with pallet magazines for a maximum of 15 Euro pallets and optionally CHEP pallets. The number of pallets with a low pallet height is additionally doubled for optimum volume utilization in the later truck.

Stability of the stacks is ensured by an additional handling system on the layer gripper system of the palletizer for automatic pick-up and placement of bottom cover sheets.

The pallet load is then secured at the factory with two stretch hood systems, product labeling for seamless batch tracking and storage of the stretched pallets in the high-bay warehouse.