Dust busting tray erector gives top reliability

Hoerbiger-Origa actuators for all linear motion axes - the only make able to withstand demanding duties in arduous environments.

The abrasiveness of cardboard dust has lead a builder of packaging tray erector machines to adopt Hoerbiger-Origa actuators for all linear motion axes, having found that they are the only make able to withstand demanding duties in arduous environments.

Cardboard trays are used for packaging in a wide variety of industries, many being high throughput, virtually continuous operations.

"In food processing for example, we have machines producing 10,000 or 20,000 trays over a 16 or 20 hour day, seven days a week," says Craig Vine, MD of Addington Engineers in Richmond North Yorkshire.

"Machine breakdowns just cannot be tolerated in such intensive production environments, so we design in bombproof reliability from the outset".

"Amongst other things this means never compromising on the best components and subsystems".

Addington Engineers uses Hoerbiger-Origa cylinders for both the infeed of flat tray blanks and the outfeed of erected trays.

In between these two stages the actual erection process involves vacuum and several synchronised pneumatic axes.

The Powerslide version of Hoerbiger-Origa's OSP rodless cylinder form the infeed and outfeed axis.

This incorporates a precision hardened steel slide that gives a smooth, predictable and reliable transfer through the machine.

"The long lasting Powerslide cuts through the dust whereas other slides have failed due to excessive wear caused by the cardboard dust," says Vine.

Hoerbiger-Origa was the inventor of the rodless pneumatic cylinder and over the intervening 30 years has developed the product to an optimised design.

The current generation of cylinders, the OSP is designed to be fully interchangeable with the company's electrically driven actuators.

The outer housing, mountings and other external details are identical, whether the drive mechanism within is pneumatic or electric.

The electric cylinders can be based on either a belt or a ballscrew to precisely match user needs; the former being best for high speeds, the latter for precision positioning accuracy.

"With OSP, we offer a full portfolio of linear actuators," says Hoerbiger's Technical Manager Ian Jones, "covering the complete spectrum of load, speed and precision requirements".

"Critically all versions are interchangeable so we can easily swap say a belt for a ballscrew or pneumatic for electric should the need arise".

This is particularly useful for OEMs like Addington Engineers who are saved from redesigning large parts of their machine for each new job.

Instead they can have a standard design to accommodate the physical dimensions of an OSP, with the decision on the appropriate drive mechanism being made to suit each individual case.

In fact Addington Engineers make use of this very feature, as Vine explains: "If the tray is 'self-locking', ie no glue is required, or if the tray is glued when stationary in the machine ie when we use PVA, the pneumatic rodless cylinder is used to transfer the blank".

"If the tray is glued with a hot melt system the glue bead is applied during the transfer of the flat blank".

"In order to obtain a consistent glue bead it is imperative that the blank travels at the same uniform speed every single time".

"We ensure this by fitting the belt-driven OSP with servo-motor to power it, rather than a pneumatic rodless which can suffer speed fluctuations if the user's site suffers from inconsistent pressure in the compressed air supply".

"There is no great bespoke design effort on our part, nor any knock-on consequences to the maintenance schedules for our service engineers.".

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