Automating Production Lines for Efficiency and Quality

The growing difficulty in finding people to work on manufacturing lines in recent years makes our customers turn to us more and more often with questions about how to speed up production and reduce the number of operators needed to manufacture a given product. As PRO-ASSEM, we usually solve these tasks by automating or robotising manual operations performed by machine and production line operators. Customers also ask us about the possibility of eliminating the human factor during the quality control of their products, because the operators, who have to check up to a thousand pieces of the finished product during one production shift, often fail to notice defects in the product, making defective products reach the end customer. Finding a non-conforming piece generates costs related to warranty service for the factory, which many times exceed the profit from the sale of one piece of the product, and weakens the brand of the factory.

One of the examples of our activities is an order made for a client from the medical industry. He asked us to build a machine to produce a new type of product, which in comparison to the customer’s existing machines, was to be 50% faster and with 50% fewer operators. In addition, the machine was also to have full control over the production process and the quality of the finished product and be corrosion resistant.

The final product of the production process are bags made of aluminium foil filled with a given amount of special liquid and precisely cut to size according to the drawing. The customer stipulated that there must be no air bubbles in the liquid. So far, the final product has been manufactured at three stations: welding a plastic mandrel, filling and cutting to the required size. After our project, the number of stations was reduced to two and the filling and cutting operations were integrated into one station.

Process flow

An empty bag made of special aluminium foil created for the sealing process, first goes to the station for sealing the plastic mandrel and embossing, and then is transferred to the station where the following automatic operations are performed:

Solution to the problem

When it comes to product cleanliness and sterility, the medical industry has much higher requirements than the automotive industry. In order to meet the customer’s requirements, for the construction of the machine we made mechanical elements from special steel grades and commercial elements with the highest corrosion resistance. In addition, the machine has been designed in such a way that all its components are easily accessible to the operator who wants to clean it.

To fill the bag with liquid, we used a special pump, whose mechanical elements do not have direct contact with the machine, which, while maintaining daily replacement of pipes feeding the liquid, ensures the sterility of the liquid. Excess liquid above the seal is extracted using ejectors. By creating the elements to carry out the most responsible operations, we used servo drives that increased the flexibility of the machine, allowing the production of several product references without having to change tooling during changeovers. For simple movements we used pneumatic actuators with reed sensors, confirming that the initial and final positions of the actuators have been reached. We used a pneumatic vibrator to remove air bubbles from the liquid. Product inspection is accomplished using vision sensors, laser sensors, and an industrial scale. Operator safety is ensured by light curtains, magnetic safety sensors and an emergency stop switch. The ergonomics of the operator is enhanced by the use of height adjustment for the stand by means of an electric screw lifting system and the operator panel with indicator lights.

Use of Balluff tools

Most of the sensors used to build the machine are made by Balluff. Full control of the production process is ensured by BVS0016 vision sensors, which control the quality of the bag sealing, BOS027R unidirectional optoelectronic barriers, which check the correctness of the position of the bag in the machine socket, and BMF00C4 reed sensors on pneumatic cylinders, which verify that each linear movement of the cylinders has been performed correctly. In the safety system, we used magnetic safety sensors BID000T on the service door and an emergency switch BAM02HA.

Benefits for the end customer

Carrying out the project of building a dedicated machine to seal and cut the bag to the required size, enabled the end customer to reduce production costs by shortening the time of the production cycle and reducing the number of operators required to operate the production line. The use of the automatic control of all bags by the machine minimised the number of complaints received by the customer to zero.

Listening carefully to the customer and taking their needs into account at the stage of construction of the machine allowed us to reduce the time needed for daily inspections, maintenance of the equipment and other activities by maintenance technicians. The customer can use the saved minutes for manufacturing and increasing the productivity of the machine further, which will generate more profits.

Use in other areas

The workstation described above, after small modifications, can be used in other factories as a filling and packing machine or simply as a machine that packs and verifies the number of elements packed into a bag. In particular, the machine can be used for production in industries with high purity requirements such as medical, food and pharmaceutical.

PRO-ASSEM Sp. z o.o. has specialised in the design and construction of machinery and instrumentation for industry for years. We build bespoke machines, tailored to your requirements and production process and taking into account the needs of all users in your plant. We supply both simple manual and semi-automatic assembly stations as well as robotised production lines. We also build systems for packaging, palletising, conveyors, “end of line” testers and measuring machines for the laboratory.