Major Cereal Producer

Take a look inside this food processing plant and you’ll find a completely automated carton unitizing system. Dematic put their knowledge to work and designed a system which lowers production costs and increases worker safety by eliminating manual unitizing.

The carton unitizing system has the versatility to handle a wide variety of case sizes and pallet build patterns. Packages range in size, from Minute Rice small, to Honeycomb large. A typical production run may include as many as six different products being packaged on nine production lines.

An engineering study helped determine the best way to unitize a sustained flow of cartons from the nine lines. The solution includes a four head, gantry style robot, working in concert with a conveyor system. Robots have the flexibility to unitize the many unique case sizes that are produced at the facility. The conveyor system continuously feeds these cases to the robot unitizing stations and conveys finished loads away from them.

The system works like this. At the start of a production cycle an operator enters the product codes for the types and sizes of cereals to be produced. System controls automatically set the unitized load patterns. If there is a change in production, the operator can easily reconfigure the patterns by entering a new product code.

Product handling begins by conveying cases from the nine production lines to the unitizing stations. Three of the stations are supplied by two conveyors each, while the fourth station is supplied by three conveyors. A turning mechanism was designed in, that orients cartons correctly before they enter the unitizing station.

Dematic lineshaft conveyor was selected for delivery and metering of product into the robotic cells. Lineshaft conveyor gently conveys the cereal products, which can break down and settle if they are not handled correctly. The conveyor accumulates and continuously feeds the product to meter belts that deliver slugs of cartons to the robot. Three of the delivery lines are linked by power transfers. This provides alternative routing that eliminates down time.

Once the robot has finished unitizing a load, it is conveyed onto a transfer car. The conveyor was designed with a "soft start" feature that keeps loads stable. The transfer car delivers the unitized load to a banding station and after the load is banded, it is transferred to one of thirteen load stations. Clamp trucks remove loads from the stations and transport them to storage.