Robot designed for PET bottles

The English Mountain Mineral Water Company in Tennessee, USA, hopes to achieve this goal by installing a state-of-the-art robotic system by reducing labor costs and improving the working environment for operators. The system consisting of a roller conveyor system, a turntable, and a robot has played a very good role in the market growth of the company's products.

The system is primarily suitable for recyclable 5 gallon polycarbonate buckets. The barrel of this bucket weighs only 2.5 pounds, but when filled with water, it can weigh 45 pounds.

Before the robotic solution was installed, the buckets had to be delivered manually. The company’s Burleson said: “It is obviously very consuming to put these buckets filled with water on the bottle racks, which makes our staff need to rotate jobs frequently.”

English Mountain Mineral Water Company has adopted and installed the Aidco company's workstation with a Kuka robot. The main tasks of this system are:

* Accepts barrel racks with 30 empty barrels sent by forklifts;
* Rotate these racks 180 degrees;
* Remove the empty barrels from the rack and send them through the roller conveyor system to the cleaning/filling/gapping system;
* Refill the buckets after filling;
* Then rotate the rack by 180 degrees.

Fitted with the robotic workstation is a 20-gallon bottle filling/filling/capping system that can be filled every minute. Burleson said: “In order to allow the filling system to continue operating at a normal speed after being equipped with robotic workstations, we need to have two workers remove the empty buckets from the rack and two others put the filled bottles on the racks. On top of that, two more people are then required to operate the forklift, and two more are responsible for the overall quality control."

After installing the Aidco KR180 system, the company automated the PET bottle packing process. This kind of operational improvement made Burleson impressed and the company's next step is to automate the loading and unloading of the 5-gallon bucket.

Burleson said: "The design and installation of this system involves a lot of engineering problems. One of the problems associated with bottle filling is feed pressure. For example, five bottles of side-by-side bottles are waiting for the robot to grab, which requires 225 pounds. The pressure, so Aidco company in the design of the program to set a certain distance between the bottles, is to let the trigger device with a camera and pneumatic arm to separate the bottles one by one, and keep the bottle spacing consistent, so that the robot every time Can accurately reach the target location.

When the forklift took the rack with 30 empty buckets off the car, the actual packing operation began. The order of these empty buckets is: 5 X 3, arranged in 2 layers, ie the bottleneck of 30 empty barrels is facing the driver of the forklift. The forklift then places the rack on the turntable. At this time, the sensor will send a signal indicating that the turntable will rotate 180 degrees, so that the rack will automatically advance a certain distance to reach the working range of the robot, and will face all the bottlenecks to the robot.

The robot is located between two racks and can handle the front and rear racks at the same time. First, five empty buckets can be unloaded from the rear rack (the rear rack is emptied), and then the empty buckets are placed on the feeding conveyors leading to the filling process, and then the five buckets ready for filling enter the filling section. . As the bucket passes through a closed route, the newly filled bucket will come out of the filling section and return to the position of the rack just removed.

This kind of robot has many functions, especially many innovative technologies. When a 2.5-pound empty bucket is picked up from the rack, three vacuum suction heads can be fixed on the bottleneck to pick up the empty bucket. However, it is worth noting that the arrayed empty buckets are divided into two layers, so when the robots come back and grab the five bottles in the bottom layer, they need to be grasped with enough extension by the action of the pneumatic expansion device.

The bottle after grabbing and filling uses a completely mechanical (non-vacuum) method, and the upper jaw is closed at the shoulder of the bottle, so that the bottle is firmly sandwiched between the upper jaw and the splint. Once the 30 bottles on the front shelf are filled with the filled bottles, the rack is emptied by the robot, so that the rear rack automatically moves forward one position, ie, the position to be loaded. After the fully loaded drum rack rotates 180 degrees, the bottleneck again faces the forklift and the driver needs to transport the drum rack to the conveyor belt for shipping to the customer.
Burleson said: "In the past, it took seven or eight people to work. It only takes three or four people to complete. The intensity of work has also been greatly reduced, and the space occupied by inventory has become surprisingly small."

In addition, this robotic workstation handles the same speeds for 3-gallon bottles and 5-gallon bottles. The structure of the bucket rack is still 5 high and 3 wide, and the 5-gallon bottle has 2 layers. 3 gallon bottles require 3 layers. However, the robot's switching operation is very simple and can be done by touching the control panel.

Source: Modern Packaging