Application:
Accumulate and single file reverse tapered wine bottles

Products:

Fill out the form on the right to receive a CAD layout and quote. Make sure to reference “W-300″ in the “What are you interested in?” field.

The world's longest conveyor is 100km (62.1 miles)

See it in google mapshere.

Even more interesting is the longest continuous belt conveyor, which is in Bangladesh and India

The longest single belt conveyor runs from Meghalaya in India to Sylhet in Bangladesh. It is about 17 km long and conveys limestone and shale at 960 tons/hr, from the quarry in India to a cement factory in Bangladesh (7 km long in India and 10 km long in Bangladesh).

The conveyor is actuated by 3 synchronized drive units for a total power of about 1.8 MW (2 drives at the head end in Bangladesh and 1 drive at the tail end in India).

Dedicated vehicles were designed for the maintenance of the conveyor, which is always at a minimum height of 5 meters above the ground to avoid being flooded during monsoon periods.

It’s impressive that it can do all that with just three drive units! Read more about the world’s longest conveyors at Wikipedia

The Faster I Go the Behinder I Get – back when I was a project engineer at Kraft Foods (as it was known then), our objective for every packaging line was to increase output. And the obvious way to do that was to run the line faster. Unfortunately, at some point, as you increase operating speed, production actually decreases, because you lose more product to problems than you gain from the increased speed.

I agree that this case exists and when a line performing very poorly, slowing things down to get control of the situation is the first and easiest thing you can do. There is, however, a reason management wants to increase production: It’s incredibly profitable to do so and worth the time (and money) to figure out how. Slowing down is not the only way to increase throughput on a consistent basis.

if the new filler you bought can run 300 bottles/min, but the labeler can only consistently run 280, you will encounter problems.

Jack’s slowdown approach would have us run the filler at a consistent rate of 280/min to match the labeler. Let’s assume that “running consistently” equates to an efficiency of 98% and this can be achieved at both the filler and the labeler. At a line speed of 280/min, the overall throughput of our simple line is 0.98 * 0.98 * 280 = 268.9 products per minute (ppm).

Higher efficiency doesn't always mean more throughput

If you raise the line to the rated filler speed (300/min) and raise the labeler to 320/min, you’re going to take a hit in efficiency on the labeler, right? If we add a buffer with a capacity of 900 products between the filler and labeler, we can withstand efficiencies on the labeler as low as 84% before dropping the line speed below 268.9ppm. For reference ow how bad 84% is, that is equal to one hour, sixteen minutes, and forty-eight seconds of downtime in an eight hour shift. If we can consistently hold an efficiency of 92% (38 minutes of downtime per shift) at the higher speed, our line will run at 294ppm. This is a 9.3% increase over slowing the line down.

Slow Down:
0.98 * 0.98 * 280 = 268.9ppm

Buffered:
0.98 * 300 = 294ppm
0.92 * 320 = 294.4ppm

294 – 268.9 = 25.1
25.1/268.9 = 0.093 = 9.3%

Jack ends with three steps:

• Slow the line incrementally until your long-term (daily? weekly?) throughput peaks and begins to decrease.
• Continue to slow the line for a short period to make sure that you have really maximized throughput and that the throughput is stabilized across all shifts.
• Slowly increase speed until output starts to fall off. Then, go back to the sustainable speed.

In many cases this may work to improve results, but it will not maximize throughput or get management off your back. If the line described above runs two eight hour shifts per day, five days per week, fifty weeks out of the year, and has a profit margin of $0.50 per product, a 9.3% improvement translates to $3,012,000 in yearly positive cash flow.

To maximize throughput:

• Identify the constraint
• Protect the constraint from all interruptions
• Increase the speed of the constraint if possible

More examples and formulas:
Packaging Throughput Example
How Big Should my Buffer Be?
Non-linear line analysis
Accumulation in a Puck Line

We’ll be showing off our Infinity Rx system for single filing and accumulating tiny vials (2ml and 3ml).

I’m a controls systems validation engineer who is doing a part-time degree in
mechatronics. My project is on exploring the replacing of the FIRO (First In / Random Out) buffers we have at work on our filling/packaging line (Bottles) for FIFO (First In / First Out) buffers and then looking at how that helps us with maintaining traceability etc.

This is a fantastic question and one I thought I understood until I started thinking about it. I also like the term FIRO, which I have to admit I never heard before. Most accumulation systems I’ve used are generally either FILO or FIFO with some randomness thrown in. A few are near perfect FIFO.

The answer to her question starts with a definition of traceability. Traceability in packaging is the power to locate when a particular product was packaged in order to isolate a problem. In the event of a recall, packagers want to minimize losses and the more traceability they have the less product gets scrapped and the more confident they are that the public is protected from sickness (or worse). Raising the precision of your traceability has significant operational and efficiency costs, so companies must select the level that makes sense for them.

What type of accumulation system you needdepends on the level of traceability you're looking for.

Here are acceptable ways to use accumulation under various levels of traceability:

Traceability by Day
If you need a product to be traceable back to a specific day, then any accumulation style will work (FIFO, FILO, FIRO, etc.). All you have to do is make sure all buffers, hoppers, and reject collectors are cleared out between shifts. Have an inspector walk the line and make sure no product has been taken off the line and set aside during production. When stacked in pallets, make sure each pallet is wrapped and marked in a way that no products can easily be removed or have their documentation tampered with. Pallets should be stored so they are not mixed with other days’ pallets.

Traceability by Hour
Keeping track of a specific hour’s production requires more rigorous procedures. All buffers should have a maximum dwell time that when added to the total production time, is no more than 30 minutes (ie. 2 buffers with 10 minutes of maximum dwell time, plus 10 minutes of total production time makes the maximum amount of time on the line 30 minutes). If the OEM cannot provide a maximum dwell time that is low enough to achieve this, then periodically you will have to artificially introduce down time to empty the buffer if it has not emptied on its own before the alloted time. This has a significant impact on efficiency.

Traceability by Case or Product
The highest level of traceability goes down to an individual product or small group (ie. case). In this scenario, no product should ever be able to pass each other on the conveyor system or in buffers, which requires tamper proof conveyors with overhead covers. Constant monitoring is required to make sure no products are removed from the packaging line unless recorded by an automatic rejector. Rejected products should be dropped into a locked box that can’t be opened in the packaging area. At that point all these extra measures begins to make RFID tracking an economical solution, which would allow you to once again use any accumulation system, even FILO ones.

Check out our selection of accumulation tables.

The 09'-'10 winter set records for snow fall.

This is my first full, in depth discussion, to start off the 2010-2011 Winter Season. As we all know, the smooth roller coaster ride has been going on since the end of October, and has continued into much of November. We have experienced both Mild and Chilly temperature, from slightly above normal to slightly below normal, but nothing really that extreme so far.

In his extremely detailed ’10-’11 winter prediction, he’s calling for approximately 21″ of snow for the entire season. That’s a lot less than last year, so I’m happy with that.