THE PROBLEM
A chemical manufacturing customer developed a brand new product years ago and has gone through three different types of machines in an effort to find the most efficient and robust equipment for assembly and filling.
THE PD&B SOLUTION
PD&B really wanted to understand what had worked well and what hadn’t in the past, so together with the customer, we identified some core technologies that seemed to work very well and others that didn’t. The result was a near 50/50 split of existing technologies with totally new methods. The two core components are bowl fed into the new part of the equipment. This consists of a series of star wheels that facilitate an accurate insertion of the straw into the body of the canister and ends with a light press to loosely secure the two pieces together. The loosely assembled units are then moved into the filling station which is mostly existing technology that had been scaled up from 10 stations to 20.
A servo-controlled volume dispenser was scaled up in size and custom fabricated by PD&B. Most critical mechanical movements utilize servos and are rotary in nature instead of linear. This leads to much smoother and efficient machine operation which can drastically reduce down time for maintenance and spare part expense. In the first two years of the machine in operation, there have been less than three major downtime events outside of operator error. The team at our customer’s site liked it so much, they purchased two more and are now able to accomplish with three machines what took them 4-6 before.