Who doesn’t love a little bit of sweetness in their life? Whether it’s a hot cup of coffee or a soothing cup of tea, sugar packets always come in handy to add the right amount of sweetness to your drink. Similar is the situation with small salt and pepper sachets available on a flight or with the commonly found mouth fresheners in Indian shops. But have you ever wondered how these small packets are precisely filled, sealed, and delivered to your table with such accuracy?
Well, the answer lies in the advanced technology and innovation of LUBI Electronics. LUBI Electronics is a game-changer in the packaging industry, providing efficient integration and automation solutions for state-of-the-art rotary filling machines that can easily handle even the smallest quantity. Additionally, to ensure seamless automation and digitalization, they rely on none other than the trusted Trio Motion Technology. So, the next time you add a little sugar to your drink, think of the cutting-edge technology that makes it all possible.
“LUBI Electronics is a leading automation solutions provider dealing in industrial automation solutions specializing in packaging, plastics, paper, textiles, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, food and beverages, machine tools, and chemicals. With our team of experienced professionals, we provide efficient integration solutions for complex engineering challenges,” says Hemant Panchal, product manager, LUBI Electronics. “With Trio Motion control products and solutions, we enable our customers to improve our machine’s productivity, decrease resource wastage, and improve product quality. It allows remarkable improvement in manufacturing quality by reducing error margins.”
LUBI helps customers to build smart processing equipment upgrading to intelligent sensors and smart vision industrial cameras for date inspection, packing defect inspection, foreign substance inspection, omission inspection, and product recognition and classification.
Advanced Rotary HFFS machine automation by LUBI
“LUBI has been providing solutions for the printing and packaging industry with over 3000 installations in the field of diverse applications. LUBI provides complete machine automation solution that helps reduce the manpower needed to operate the machine. Our HFFS machine automation solution is extremely sustainable deploying next-generation automation products enabling high-speed operations with accurate print mark correction,” says Panchal.
Advanced Rotary HFFS machines have different types of fillers, such as rotary disk/screw filler. These rotary machines have a high-speed rotary disk/screw filler connected to the hopper for calibrated filling. Accurately weighed material is dispensed on the rotary table in small sections for filling. The rotary disk/screw filler is synchronized with the pouch formation, pulling, sealing, and cutting axes. The machine is capable of print mark correction with extremely high accuracy. Rotary Horizontal Form Fill Seal machines are used for smaller packets with a lower weight. The machines have vertical sealing bars that seal the sachets vertically and a horizontal sealer that seals and makes perforations to the sachets. The conveyor on the output then transfers the sachets to a cartoning machine for packaging and shipping.
The rotary HFFS machine packages sachets of 50-70 mm in length, which are further packed in cartons in the cartoning machine. Together the rotary HFFS and the cartoning machine deploy 16+ servo axes. A single controller from Trio Motion Technology controls the rotary HFFS machine as well as the cartoning machine. The machine was equipped with a single feeder unit, but with rising consumer demand, the machine was scaled to incorporate 2 feeder axes.
“With Trio Motion products and solutions, we enable LUBI with efficient production ratios, object printing, and precision packaging with safe and reliable operation processes, including easy troubleshooting. Our control products offer high accuracy, precision, efficiency, throughput, and speed. We are proud of the fact that we are a trusted automation partner for LUBI Electronics for all their automation, motion, and control needs,” says Upendra Vanarase, managing director, Trio Motion Technology India.
Accuracy as low as +/- 1mm
These rotary machines are designed to provide best-in-class productivity and performance. “With our solutions and technologies, LUBI Electronics operate these machines at 2800 (operating speed) and 3500 (rated speed) pouches per minute for a pouch length of 50-70 mm. Our integrated automation solutions make such high speeds possible,” shares Vanarase. “We also drastically reduced the programming, configuration, and commissioning time of the huge machine to 7 days, thanks to our packaging template.”
With Trio’s packaging template, engineers reduce their programming effort as the template helps them to configure more and program less. Experienced engineers at Trio Motion Technology India have created a comprehensive packaging template that allows other engineers to set up the system and decrease the need for programming while on-site. This ultimately shortens the commissioning time, resulting in a shorter time-to-market.
Another advantage of Trio Motion Technology for LUBI Electronics was the high accuracy at such phenomenal speeds. “We achieved an accuracy of +/- 1mm for print mark correction at 3500 pouches per minute for a pouch length of 50-70 mm. I have not seen such accuracy at such high speeds for any machines. Trio Motion Technology made the job look so easy,” cites Panchal.
EtherCAT – communication backbone for high-speed operations
Trio Motion controllers are based on powerful, real-time EtherCAT technology enabling seamless, high-speed synchronization between the motion controller and drives. EtherCAT supports almost all topologies – line, tree, star or daisy chain. EtherCAT overcomes the limitations arising from cascading switches and hubs, as it is possible to make a pure bus or line topology with hundreds of nodes. Modular machines usually need network segments or nodes to be connected and disconnected during operation, a Hot Connect feature already included in EtherCAT slave controllers. EtherCAT offers Trio Motion controllers, drives, and I/Os run on EtherCAT, achieving extremely low cycle times of 100 µs and a low jitter of 1µs for accurate synchronization.
Collaborative partnerships for cutting-edge machines
“We are committed to generating growth by meeting customer demands. We know that such growth is only possible through strong collaborations and partnerships. We are a trusted partner for total industrial automation enabling businesses to enhance the efficiency of processes, improve productivity, and optimize ROI by delivering turnkey automation and integrated solutions. We also want our partners to reciprocate the same ideology. We are happy that with our partnership with Trio Motion Technology, we can serve our customers with enhanced vigor,” says Panchal.
By seamlessly integrating Trio Motion controllers and drives running on EtherCAT technology, LUBI Electronics has achieved exceptional precision and accuracy – +/- 1 mm – at an incredible speed of 3500 pouches per minute. This cutting-edge technology can help businesses stay ahead of the curve and achieve their goals, and LUBI Electronics is proud to be at the forefront of this exciting field.
