Making a cartoner fast and flexible

Food & Drug Packaging, March, 2005

Triangle Package Machinery Co., one of the leading manufacturers of cartoners, had a problem. Cartoners, like many other packaging machines, usually have to balance speed against footprint: As throughput increases, the machine has to get bigger.

Cartoner end users who want throughput approaching 250 cartons per minute would thus have to buy a large continuous-motion cartoner. If space is an issue, the end user would have to look at intermittent-motion cartoners, most of which top out at about 60 cartons per minute.

Triangle wanted its new FlexCell cartoner to occupy a niche firmly in the middle: throughput of up to 100 cartons a minute in a footprint of no more than 50 square feet. Meeting these requirements required rethinking of some traditional elements in cartoner design. That, in turn, required components from Rockwell Automation.

Triangle's design included making part of the carton handling and indexing portion of the machine vertical. And, rather than moving in a strictly horizontal fashion, flat cartons are elevated, set up and indexed downward. This allows the FlexCell to occupy less than half the silhouette of a traditional horizontal cartoner.

Integrated architecture, with the help of Rockwell products, helped Triangle achieve this goal. A ControlLogix controller, Ultra3000 digital servo drives and MP-Series servo motors help confer the flexibility needed to make the FlexCell compact and versatile.

This ControlLogix-based solution, with eight servo axes and a noise-immune fiber-optic interface, eliminates multiple application programs and other redundancies. A single integrated system simplifies the system architecture and streamlined the machine development process.

This solution also makes changeovers easier. The machines' users only need to enter parameters once for each size of carton they plan to run, using a touchscreen with Rockwell's PanelView software. After that, users simply indicate the carton size, the servo drives adjust accordingly, and it's ready to run. Changeovers that previously took up to four hours can now be done in as little as 20 minutes.

This flexibility also enables Triangle to simplify its stock of mechanical parts, greatly decreasing the time needed to assemble each machine to order, says Steve Bergholt, Triangle's chief electronics engineer.

"We can forecast and prebuild the Triangle/FlexCell, allocating our resources to get a machine to market in three months instead of six, saving thousands of dollars in engineering costs," Bergholt says.