New carton forming machine for efficient packaging of effervescent tablets

Amerilab Technologies, the largest manufacturer of effervescent products in the US nutritional industry, installed three new carton forming machines for packaging effervescent tablets in hoses and bags. These machines work very smoothly and help the company achieve efficient production.

Amerilab Technologies of Plymouth, Minn., is a private label and contract manufacturer specializing in the development and production of self-owned and other brands of effervescent tablets and dietary supplements. Given its 225,000 square foot facility, it is the largest effervescent product producer in the US nutritional industry.

installation
Amerilab produces many different kinds of packaging, including bagged and hose packed tablets. Last year, it installed 3 ADCO Manufacturing Model 15BC105 continuous motion, automatic loading horizontal carton forming machines to produce these products. Two of them installed ADCO's proprietary star wheel indexer for hose products, while the third was only responsible for bag packaging. “We saw this kind of machine at the Pack Expo. Its handling made a deep impression on us. It is very stable and won't drop a package,” said Dawn Poellinger, vice president of production. "Our impression of their short delivery cycle is also profound - it's only eight to ten weeks."

Senba USA, of Hayward, Calif., used an ADCO cartoner to produce its Asian food products for retail, wholesale, restaurants, and industrial users. The bag packaging machinery arrived in December 2005 and the two hose machines were separated. In February and March. "ADCO's technicians help us to install, operate and train our operators and maintenance personnel," Poellinger said. “The whole process took less than a week. Their technical staff knew very well what they were doing and it worked very well with our staff. Soon, when the second machine arrived, they returned. The three machines were installed by ourselves."

Continuous-motion, self-loading horizontal cartoners run hose and bag packaging products.

Carton forming
During the PD visit, the bag packaging machine was producing a bag containing four Drinkin` Mate(TM) effervescent tablets. In this operation, the bags are manually placed on the feed conveyor and the packages are fed into the machine via the conveyor belt. Flat, end-loaded cartons are placed into a 4-foot long power-driven hopper that feeds them to a rotating, three-head carton feeder. The vacuum cups on the three heads took the trays out of the front of the silo and propped them up on a carton conveyor where they were open and the machine grabbed the lid.

Fill bags and hoses
When the bag and carton pass through the carton forming machine, the automatic drum cam plater pushes the bag into the carton. The machine is equipped with no product/no paper cassette and no paper cassette/no product sensor. In this way, if the list of products on the conveyor belt is empty, the carton in the corresponding column on the carton conveyor will not be propped up. In turn, if the cassette is missing, the corresponding flapper will not move and the product will travel to the end of the conveyor and fall into a basin.

The cartoner is also equipped with an automatic product inserter featuring an adjustable overload sensing system with automatic recovery. If a bag encounters a blockage when it is pushed into the carton, the sensor will detect the malfunction, retract the pusher and stop the machine so that the operator can remove the blockage. The filled cartons are sealed by a Nordson ProBlue hot melt system and then used by Videojet Technologies for a variety of bar code inkjet printers to print the date of consumption on the bottom cover of the cartons.

The vacuum cup removes the carton from the bin and places it on the carton conveyor where they are opened.

The other two special star wheel indexers on ADCO equipment for hose production have a simple and original system that can deliver one or two hoses to be pushed into the carton. The hose is transported end to end on the conveyor belt and into the cavity of the rotary indexer. After rotating 90 degrees, the hose falls onto a short, oscillating metal plate. When producing a single hose package, the metal plate recycles the hose and drops it onto the conveyor belt of the carton forming machine. . In order to be able to load both hoses into the same carton, the reciprocally oscillating metal plate remains stationary below the indexer until the hoses in both cavities have fallen onto it, after which it reciprocates and oscillates. Drop both hoses into the same product column on the product conveyor. The flapper then pushes both hoses into the tray.

The filled cartons will be sealed by a hot melt system, and then the inkjet printers with multiple barcodes will be used to print the date of consumption on the bottom cover of the cartons.

Carton sealing and coding
“The carton forming machine really works great,” Poellinger said. “We have not experienced any major downtime. When we really needed the ADCO service, they performed very well. Their technical service staff was very knowledgeable and well prepared.”

Effervescent pill bag packaging is done on Wrapade Packaging Systems vertical forming/filling/sealing machines. The tablets are loaded into an overhead hopper, which spreads the tablets over the four tracks leading to the forming/filling/seal area. At the time of the PD visit, the factory is producing four bags of two-by-two packages, so the machine is producing two packages at the same time. Bags of paper/polyethylene/aluminum foil/paint film (from outside to inside) composite film were provided by Winpak Heat Seal Packaging. Two rolls of film are used to produce the bags. One volume is randomly printed with the product name, while the other volume is blank. The bag is sealed and perforated in the middle of each vertical row and horizontal row of pills, horizontally cut in two rows.

The sealed carton is manually placed on the display tray and then delivered to the shrink wrap system consisting of the wrapper and the shrinking channel immediately following it.

Reprinted from: Packaging Expo