Chronos BTH is installing a robot palletising system at the British Bakels powder blending and production unit at Bicester in Oxfordshire. A wide range of bread and confectionery ingredients are produced on site and packed in sizes from 250 grams to 1 tonne bags.
The new system will palletise 10kg to 25kg sized bags produced from two existing Chronos BTH packing lines. One of these is manually operated while the second is an automatic packing line.
Chronos BTH equipment will be integrated into the manual packing line to provide bag flattening, metal detection and bag transferring to the robot palletiser cell. The automatic packing line will have a secondary de-aeration system and the provision of cross conveyors to transfer the filled bags to the robot palletiser cell.
The robot palletiser and innovative gripper head will select pallets appropriate to its programme for either the manual or automatic packing lines. The gripper will place a slip sheet onto the pallet before commencing bag palletising. The operating protocol will allow the robot to pick and palletise bags whenever they are available from each packing line.
Integrated conveying systems are designed to accumulate filled bags during the empty pallet placing and replenishing cycles. The new system has been rated for anticipated future increases in packing output.