Filling bottles on the move

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July 2003 Motion Control & Drives

Towards the end of July, at the Wine Farmers & Fruit Growers Exhibition in Cape Town's Convention Centre, SEW-Eurodrive will be demonstrating how to fill multiple wine bottles while they are moving along a conveyor. Whilst the bottles move along the conveyor at constant speed, the bottles will be filled in batches of six at a time. The SEW Movidrive drive inverter will be controlling the system.

Bottles travelling on a bottling conveyor need to be filled from the bottle filler, which travels above the bottles. The bottle filler carriage must be pre-synchronised prior to filling, and has to travel synchronously with the bottles during the filling process - and travel back to the starting position at the end of the process to start the cycle all over again.

A master encoder on the system controlling the flow of liquid detects and controls the filling length, that is, the distance the conveyor will have to travel in order to fill the bottle to the correct level. The Movidrive inverter processes this information. There is no need for filling marks on the conveyor. A carriage with the filling nozzles moves into the 'fill' position. Sensors detect the filling marks on the bottles and the filling process starts and stops when the bottles are full.

Encoder signals from both the filler carriage and the conveyor are fed to the Movidrive. Any variation in conveyor speed is detected and automatically compensated for so that synchronisation is maintained at all times. One of the several advantages of the Movidrive system is the saving in time to set up the system for any number of different batches in the bottling programme. This is because built into the standard Movidrive units are a number of ready-to-use application modules. In this bottling example, the 'flying saw' module is selected - so-called because the solution is the same for the synchronisation of cutting lengths of material on the move from an extruder. The user-friendly interface guides the user through the process of entering the parameters. Only those parameters required for the specific application need be entered.

Movidrive drive inverters are designed to make each application flexible and efficient. The units are equipped with the integral IPOS positioning and sequence control system, the Movitools operating software and standardised application modules.

For more information contact Paul Strzalkowski, SEW-Eurodrive, 021 552 9820, [email protected]

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Motion Control & Drives

Filling bottles on the move

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