Customer/ industry

Today, products ranging from beer to pet food are often packaged in cans.

These products are manufactured in very high quantities. Our customer, a well-known Swiss company that supplies machines for seaming cans worldwide, is developing a new generation of can seaming machines. These machines seal up to 2500 cans per minute.

Product development

In future, the machines are to be standardised, modularised and more flexibly adaptable to the customer's needs.

The customer does not have the necessary resources to develop a whole generation of new machines within a reasonable period and therefore calls on our help.

At the entrance to the machine, the cans are conveyed from the filling station to the seaming machine by means of a so-called infeed table. This machine part exists in countless designs and the goal is to standardise it.

The infeed table must also be optionally available with an automatic WIP/CIP system. This in turn means that the entire system must be hygienic and CIP-capable. The infeed table must later be able to be upgraded to an asynchronous table where the cans are fed to the infeed table by a screw.

Function

The filled cans are taken over by the filling machine (usually a rotary machine) and fed to the seaming machine via the linear section of the infeed table. The cans must be taken over from the filling machine precisely, accurately and without jerks, and transported on to the seamer without vibrations via the linear section.

The transport is carried out with a special chain with drivers adapted to the cans, whereby the chain runs synchronously with the filling line and the seamer.

After the end of production, the infeed table must be able to be cleaned of any residues fully automatically.

Our services

Our task is to develop a completely new infeed table. The new infeed table must be so flexible that all known special designs can be solved with it. In addition, there are new, increased hygiene requirements and, as a functional extension, the possibility of CIP/WIP.

Workflow / Skills

Our task is summarised in a simple requirement specification. We expand this specification in a first phase, in which we hold intensive discussions with the customer and compile all possible requirements and variants. In this phase, we also evaluate the many different requirements and wishes and classify them according to urgency.

In the 2nd phase we look for solutions to reconcile the different requirements. This results in many proposals, which we discuss with the client and evaluate together. If there are uncertainties regarding feasibility, we occasionally produce test parts. Where necessary, FEM calculations are used to provide the necessary proof of strength.

The procedure is not linear, but iterative, i.e. new needs, findings and wishes of the customer are continuously incorporated.

In the 3rd phase, the final production documents are created.

Benefit

During the project, we are directly linked to the customer via VPN. This means that we can obtain data from the customer's ERP system and store our data on their system. This way, the customer always has our status of work and can reuse it when working on the other modules of the machine.

At the end of the project, the customer has all the data such as drawings, models, calculations, configuration tables, etc. entered in his ERP system and can use them for production without any additional effort.