In Japan, slices of bread are lightly toasted or baked twice. There are differences in size and shape from one slice of bread to another. The task was to transfer 240 slices of bread per minute from the cooling tunnel, place two slices on top of each other in the chain of the Fuji flow-wrap machine and make sure that the upper slice is always the smaller of the two. Placing the slices of bread in this fashion is necessary in order to not mislead the consumer. 

There is nothing better than a Schubert TLM picker line for solving this task: A TLM picker line which synchronizes with the infeed chain of the flow-wrap bag machine with an average speed of 305 mm a second. The slices of bread enter the machine via a continuously running conveyor belt. The art of the picker line is to adapt it to the  product flow in such a way that all good products are picked up from the belt and, in spite of irregular production, to ensure that no packages are empty or partially filled. TLM picker lines have been developed for this purpose, with their patented counter-directional workflow and their control design. This design allows the robot arms to independently coordinate which one places what component where. A gripper, specially developed for Harada, picks up each slice of bread after it has run through the TLM image processing system. The difficulty here was that the slices of bread are extremely breakable. Anything that does not meet the quality specifications or is not an exact match is left lying on the belt.

The TLM packaging line for Finlay comprises five machine frames accommodating, from right to left, two carton erecting stations, one filling station and two closing stations. After filling, the boxes are closed with an attached inner lid and an attached outer lid.

The line can currently package five different pack sizes, containing 80, 100, 120, 160 and 240 bags. The tea bags are fed into the blue bins from several different teabag machines at a rate of 8000 per minute and a TLM-F2 robot in the central part of the line fills boxes, which have been erected from flat blanks, through hoppers. During the filling process, a second TLM-F2 robot executes a cleverly designed vibration program designed to shake out and evenly distribute the teabags in the boxes.

The compact TLM line offers clear and easy access to all its functions, and can be reset within just minutes.

The company Droga placed an order for two TLM packaging machines to process its tinned liver pâtés – at least that was how the story began …The brief was already slightly on the complex side: The retail trays, which have to be erected from flat blanks and  glued, are fitted with folded-in tabs to hold the tins in their upright position. The various sized trays have to be filled with tins at a rate of 450 per minute. The trays are then closed using a slipped lid, also erected from a flat blank, and glued shut. Lidding takes place either singly or in pairs – in which case, the pairs first have to be glued at the ends to form a single unit.

So far so good – but then add the extra complication that the maximum available space is just 2.5 x 4.5 m! With 450 tins per minute arriving at the machine, no fewer than 75 trays of 6 tins have to be erected and lidded every minute. For the double pack size, an amazing 37.5 finished packs a minute are produced! The solution we implemented is described as follows:

At the bottom right of the picture, showing an overview of the entire inner workings of the TLM packaging machine, the tins enter a  grouping chain. A TLM-F2 robot removes 12 tins at a time and places them conforming to the pack layout into carriers, which are fixed on TLM vacuum conveyors.

The erecting dies are visible on the left of the picture. These erect three packaging trays at a time and place them on three vacuum conveyors. Held by suction to the conveyor, the trays are transported to the filling station where the tins are removed from the carriers and placed into trays. After filling, the packaging trays are glued along the side. During the subsequent lidding cycle, these are glued to form a unit while the lids are simultaneously erected and glued.The lid can be easily removed at the point of sale. The machine can be easily adapted for different pack sizes by a quick change of tools.