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Roller conveyors are excellent for building semi to fully automated manufacturing processes. They’re efficient, quiet, and low-maintenance, which makes them a go-to solution for many CPG manufacturers. Pack Air Inc. has recently manufactured a system that primarily utilizes Motor-driven Roller (MDR) but also incorporates several other conveyor types in the overall process. The first area we’ll discuss is the tote infeed, merges, and diverts.
Although this is a fully automated system, there are areas with human interaction. The first of which are 8 loading lanes where confectionery employees depalletize the full totes by hand and place them on the infeeds of the MDR conveyor system. The MDR conveyors allow for manual introduction of product and accumulation to buffer the infeed to the automated system. They can also run in reverse and send totes back to the operators if the first machine in the process needs to be purged.
After that process is accomplished, the empty tote proceeds up one of the 8 inclined high-friction modular belt conveyors and merges into a MDR conveyor trunk line. Each merge utilizes “traffic cop” logic to allow totes to combine from the 8 lanes down to 1 without any traffic jams.
After merging, all totes on the trunk line pass through a photo-eye vision system that tells the interface if something is still inside them. If something is inside them, the totes will be diverted off the trunk line with a pop-up diverter to a reject lane where operators can manually clean out the tote. The reject lane involves a declined gravity roller conveyor system with roller brakes to relieve some back pressure at the operator station.
If the vision system sees a clean tote, it will pass straight through the divert into a declined poly-v linked MDR conveyor with high friction sleeves on each roller. From there, the totes can then proceed to the automated stacking station and the tote storage area which Pack Air has also built.
