has joined forces with Italian Pack to present Argo, an automatic tray sealing machine. Equipped with an innovative anti-agitation system, this machine addresses the challenge of packaging liquid and semi-liquid products without spills.
Italian Pack has been in the packaging market since 1988 with its offer of packaging systems for trays, cardboard boxes, cans and bags. One of the brand's recent challenges has been to provide manufacturers of liquid and semi-liquid food products with a solution capable of operating at high cycle times and avoiding product spills.
This need led to the creation of a new automatic tray packaging line, Argo, which quickly attracted market attention due to its special intelligent conveying system, called Smart Liquid System, a solution that uses an innovative patent-pending anti-agitation system. , to package products at high speed and without spill problems.
A key factor in the success of the project was the collaboration with OMRON. OMRON's team of Italian and European engineers supported Italian Pack both in developing the underlying algorithm of the anti-shaking system and in supplying the hardware components necessary to implement the line.
The key is in the anti-agitation system
Argo is an automatic in-line tray sealing machine designed to meet the needs of end users, mainly producers of soups, sauces and ready meals, who are forced to limit their production rate to avoid product spillage problems during the packaging.
At the core of this complex handling system is an algorithm developed by Italian Pack's R&D department in collaboration with OMRON, which estimates the resonance frequency of a liquid inside a container to dampen the waves generated when the trays They move forward and stop, preventing spills.
“The challenge was to transform a mathematical model into a real application,” explains Marco Coduri, Field Application Engineers Coordinator at OMRON. For this reason, the integration was carried out in two different packaging phases, but was managed through a single block of functions: on the one hand, the introduction of the trays into the machine and, on the other, the most critical one related to the intelligent conveyor belt, which is necessary to distribute the trays so that their equidistance is guaranteed.
One controller for 8 axes
In addition to the research and development work on the anti-agitation system, Argo required the integration of several OMRON technologies, essential to make the different processing stages more efficient: an OMRON NX1P2 PLC with Sysmac devices: 1S servo systems and EtherCAT M1 drives. The PLC manages and coordinates the entire process, from the introduction of the trays to the sealing itself, including the tensioning and movement of the sealing film. The latter, also based on an algorithm, has been configured to ensure constant and repeatable film tension and debris collection.
A total of 8 axes are managed, driven by brushless motors (ranging from 400 W to a maximum of 5,5 kW for sealing bell movement) to ensure high positioning accuracy and reduced cycle times.
Up to 40% increase in productivity
Thanks to the innovative anti-agitation system developed in collaboration with OMRON, Italian Pack can now enter the packaging market for liquid and semi-liquid products with a productivity increase of 30 to 40%. Specifically, Argo can operate at up to 25 cycles per minute in sealed mode, up to 18 cycles per minute in modified atmosphere (MAP) mode and up to 10 cycles per minute in skin mode.
In addition to offering customers higher performance, Argo also provides a tangible advantage in terms of hygiene, meaning less machine contamination, better sealing quality and less tray waste, contributing to sustainability.
