The Cardboard Box Company was able to access the expertise and state-of-the-art capabilities at the AMRC due to a funding initiative ran by the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HMVC). The initiative match-funds the costs involved in conducting research and development projects for SMEs.

The company attended a tour of the AMRC’s Factory 2050 – home to IMG – and was blown away at the technical level that underpinned the research and development in the aerospace, automotive and other industries at the facility. During the tour, those attending were told how the AMRC regularly works with SMEs through the funding initiative ran by the HMVC; so the Cardboard Box Company jumped at the chance of working with IMG and explore how its manufacturing operations could be improved using the latest manufacturing technologies and processes.

Managing director of The Cardboard Box Company, Ken Shackleton, said: “The AMRC came to visit us in Accrington to look at our operation and how they might improve upon any of our manufacturing processes. It was decided that exploring the possibility of installing some form of robotics at the end of one of our production lines would help with our palletisation process. With potential benefits of maintaining consistent production speeds, whilst reducing manual labour and the health and safety issues related to the process.”

This kind of development is valuable for SMEs such as The Cardboard Box Company, as it allows them to redeploy employees to production processes requiring higher skill levels and therefore a greater need of manual intervention, creating valuable efficiencies

The company produces 22,000 cardboard boxes per hour on its machines, with operators loading and unloading cardboard bales which weigh between 15-20kg manually, an incredibly labour intensive process. To address this, IMG successfully developed a cost-effective automated system which uses a robotic arm palletising bundles of boxes. The prototype system was used to demonstrate to The Cardboard Box Company how it would be able to halve the time operators spend manually handling the cardboard materials during production.

IMG project manager Ben Fisher said: “This kind of development is valuable for SMEs such as The Cardboard Box Company, as it allows them to redeploy employees to production processes requiring higher skill levels and therefore a greater need of manual intervention, creating valuable efficiencies.

“Alongside this benefit, this kind of automated technology brings consistency and speed to the production process and has valuable applications in safeguarding the health and safety of employees; reducing the need for physically demanding manual operations.”

Shackleton added: “For the amount of expenditure incurred, the result was remarkable. We have subsequently received from the AMRC a number of companies to approach who can build a full industrial version of this robot with indicative costs which we are about to pursue.”

Projects of this nature are invaluable to demonstrate to SMEs the access they have to work with research institutions such as the AMRC; to develop and integrate state-of-the-art automated production processes and technologies at low-cost, on any scale.

Shackleton said: “This would not have been possible without the help of AMRC. For an SME to be able to access this technical level of knowledge to develop a project or resolve manufacturing issues is incredible. To have access to an organisation that is currently developing the ideas and processes for some of the most advanced technical businesses in the world is a privilege. If we are to build and promote manufacturing in the UK, then the services of AMRC need to be taken advantage of.”

Visit the AMRC website for more information

Northwood & WEPA specialises in the production of bathroom and kitchen rolls and aims for market recognition for its quality, service, innovation, sustainability and price.

The plant in Bridgend near Cardiff has both tissue making and converting operations. Packing and dispatch of the finished products is a complex operation because the company produces many different sizes of multipack and these are arranged on pallets for transportation in a great many different patterns.

The production hall is used for packing and has a shuttle conveyor to deliver batches of products to one of two robotised palletising stations. Northwood & WEPA brought in electrical and automation specialist Platinum Controls from nearby Neath to work on the control systems. Stephen Vincent, Technical Director of Platinum, recalls how the project developed.

“We reviewed the site and looked at options for control solutions. One of our key recommendations was to use a flexible but competitively priced SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) package. The one we recommended was Movicon made by Progea in Italy and available in the UK exclusively through Products4Automation (P4A), with whom we have worked on several other projects. We have always found the Movicon product to be very cost competitive yet highly functional. It is also easy to programme, install and commission, so saves us time in commissioning.”

Robots have become increasingly popular for palletising duties in recent years because of the weights they can lift without risking repetitive strain injuries and the productivity levels they can achieve. This is coupled with their ability to execute a number of different loading patterns and the flexibility to change quickly from one product or sequence to another.

The system designed by Platinum Controls is based on Movicon SCADA technology. It controls the robot’s programs from a database of many different pallet filling patterns which are chosen according to the size and shape of the multipacks being palletised and/or to meet individual customer preferences.

The operators interact with the robots via an industrial keyboard and a 21 inch touch screen monitor mounted on the electrical control panel. At these they are able to enter a password and easily select the required stacking pattern. They are also able to develop and store new stacking patterns from the control panel, which previously had to be done by the production/engineering team.

“These new patterns are stored in the database under names added by the operators themselves, rather than using long reference numbers,” says Vincent. “This small change has proved popular and effective because the reference numbers were difficult to remember, whereas the names are completely intuitive.”

The hardware used in the control system includes two PLCs (programmable logic controllers), one communications driver, 9211 I/O and a PC that can display over 50 different information screens.

Movicon is a SCADA solution based on XML and Web Services technologies, making it easy to understand and intuitive to use. Its modular design allows bespoke systems that meet the exact needs of each application to be built quickly and simply. As it is almost inevitable that applications need to change, develop and grow over time, Movicon’s developers were careful to make sure that expansion and alterations to systems are also straightforward.

Paul Hurst of Products4Automation says: “Movicon is designed to improve productivity, reduce integration times and operating costs, and to optimise asset utilisation. We sell it as a pure software package, or installed on an industrialised PC or HMI product. Fast control and visualisation, in addition to good data recording made it an ideal choice for the palletisation application.”

Movicon is designed to be easy to use, while providing open connectivity, compliance with multiple standards, reliability, security and reusability. Hurst goes on to explain that there are no additional development fees with Movicon, hence the always-competitive prices that Products4Automation quotes.

At Northwood & WEPA the Movicon system is integrated with other plant wide control systems so that it is co-ordinating packaging with production and order dispatch requirements.

Visit the Products4Automation website for more information

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“Innomech’s automation specialists worked alongside our in-house team to automate a series of intricate manufacturing tasks and to ensure their innovative solution fits perfectly into our existing workflows,” says David Parmenter, operations manager at ITW. “None of our upstream manufacturing processes had to be amended, and there is no need for ‘work in progress’ trays, preloading of parts into special hoppers or double handling of any components.”

Innomech was initially appointed to automate two particularly labour-intensive and repetitive manufacturing tasks that required multiple operators with consistently high levels of manual dexterity: adding injection moulded drive gear and idle components to the correct ends of wound or empty spools; then pairing the spools and attaching the start of the ribbon onto the take-up spool. The consultancy’s automation engineers needed to modify the manufacturing process to ‘bridge’ the two spools using an adhesive label because the manual steps could not easily be automated. The label has the added advantage that it can be printed on demand with customer-specific, marketing or other messages as required.

The new system uses a Toshiba robot with a sophisticated laser-guided 3D vision system to load spools into the machine. The robot scans the box of wound spools, works out the depth and position of components, before picking up groups of wound spools, verifying they are correctly orientated and loading them into the machine. A separate loading system feeds empty spools from a hopper before the ends are fitted and locked in place.

The machine then rotates the wound spool to ‘find’ the end flap, applies a label to link the wound and take-up spools, winds the empty spool to take up the exposed adhesive surface, and then passes the paired spools onto ITW’s existing flow wrapping station. Innomech has also configured ITW’s new automated assembly machine to handle multiple different spool sizes with simple menu-based selections allowing operators to quickly and easily change it over as required.

Visit the GB Innomech website for more information.

Use of robotics has increased in recent years, in a wave of industrial innovation as part of a fundamental drive to maximize productivity. But any breakdown can mean serious problems, as the line automation engineer at the Flintshire paper mill explains: “If we experience an eight hour downtime event, that can lead to the mill stopping production.” In this case, the deteriorating reliability of the robot was clearly critical and warranted the purchase of a replacement.

Commenting on the choice of the KUKA robot, the project engineer responsible at KUKA says: “Being cost competitive was an obvious key factor in winning the contract, but we also offered better overall value for the customer together with excellent customer support throughout the project.”

According to KUKA’s project engineer, the most challenging part of the project was calculating the arc the robot had to take relative to the roll diameter and width sent over the bus by the PLC.

The task of programming, installing and commissioning the new robot was given to independent automation company and KUKA partner Optima Control Solutions. Optima had to integrate the new robot with the existing machine control system. The automation engineer at the mill comments: “We had complete confidence in the company’s expertise – KUKA recommended Optima as the best system integrator out there. Their joint offering was within our budget and with their excellent reputation we had no doubts that they would do a great job.”

Included within the robot control system was a 3G router solution, making remote diagnostics possible via LogMeIn – a remote control desktop website.

Visit the Optima Control Solutions website for more information.