British Bakels adds robotic line
4 May 2011
Bicester, UK – Chronos BTH is installing a robot palletising system at the bakery ingredients supplier British Bakels Ltd’s powder blending and production unit at Bicester, Oxfordshire.
British Bakels produces a range of bread and confectionery ingredients, which are 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 manually operated, the other automatic.
Nottingham-based Chronos BTH’s 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 installed and the provision of cross conveyors to transfer the filled bags to the cell.T
The palletiser and gripper head will select pallets appropriate to its palletising 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. Downstream from the robot palletiser there is an existing wrapper. The new robot palletising system has been rated for anticipated future increases in packing output; and includes space for automatic empty pallet dispensing systems and automatic wrapper.
The requirements were for an integrated conveying and palletising system that was reliable and adaptible for future plant upgrades, according to Simon Dawson of British Bakels.
“This project started in 2010 and aimed to review manual handling in the production areas. Our powder products that come off our two main production lines are weighed into different pack sizes varying from 10kg to 25kg in plastic bags; up to 1000kg FIBCs”, said Dawson.
“Currently the plastic bags are manually stacked onto the finished goods pallets, which had Health and Safety implications that we knew we could improve or eliminate. As a result in 2010 we started looking at end of line automation.”
