BRILLOPAK has launched its new TrayPAKer product, described as a high-speed robot-based packaging solution that also offers multi-material handling capabilities.
The model is said to solve many of the food industry’s ‘most pressing concerns’, including the speed of supermarket supply chains, scarcity of manual labour, environmental ambitions, and the ability to transition from plastic to cardboard punnet packaging.
“The primary driver behind the machine’s development was from our customers in fresh produce,” said David Jahn, sales director at Brillopak. “We were regularly being told ‘I need a solution to overcome the struggle of constantly trying to find new operators’. Automation was always going to be the answer, but it needs to deliver far more than just the ability to replace line-side personnel.
“In this market efficiency is everything. The prices are set by the supermarkets, so our customers have to find economies in all the steps prior to final delivery. This machine is more than capable of meeting current demands and deploys a technological solution that will enable users to support what they don’t know will happen tomorrow!”
Brillopak explained that the 150 punnets-per-minute machine combines robotics and vision systems with patented servo-driven end effectors and then deploys them in a pick-and-place operation that ‘seamlessly’ addresses many challenges companies face when automating this process.
A dedicated accumulation conveyor manages the build-up of punnets before feeding them into the pick-up area. There, one delta robot picks and places the packs onto the conveyor in a layer pattern, which is then indexed, oriented and compressed to the dimensions of the crate or container. A second delta robot with a different end effector then picks up the whole layer and lowers into the crate or container.
Brillopak added that this whole-layer approach addresses ‘misalignment’ issues created by single-punnet pick and place and delivers a ‘neater’ shelf-ready appearance. Different packaging materials can be handled on the same machine using tailored pre-programmed packaging recipes in combination with package-specific end effectors.
“It is vital that we look to the future when designing our packaging systems,” said Peter Newman, technical director at Brillopak. “We recognise that automation can be a big step for some companies, so we must leverage our extensive research and development capabilities and domain expertise to design machines that will keep delivering market- leading performance well into the future.
“One of the big drivers is sustainability, so as well as dealing with the pliability of the thin plastic punnets, customers have asked us to cater for cardboard variants too, both of which they want packed at speed and in neatly presented shelf-ready configurations.
“Dealing with any of these features in isolation is hard enough, but when you’re challenged with addressing all of them, simultaneously, it becomes much more… interesting. Fortunately, we have some superb engineers here and we were more than up to the task.”
