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Send to KindleInnovative pouch filler installed at Jel Sert
The mechanics
Pouches arrive from Kapak suspended by the fitment neck from rails ready to be loaded directly into the Hensen machine. For now Kapak also heat-seals the Seaquist fitments into the top of each pouch. Ingemi says that eventually Jel Sert will insert the firment into the pouches in their facility.
An operator feeds each rail onto a belt at one end of the Hensen machine. The rails with pouches suspended are conveyed to the feed station. One-by-one a starwheel grabs each pouch from the rail by the neck pushing an already filled pouch to a conveyor below.
The unfilled pouches begin rotating around a turret. The fill tube descends filling the pouch. As soon as the pouch is filled the starwheel rotates the pouch to a capping mechanism that places the cap over the fitment and torques it down. Filled and capped pouches make one revolution around the turret and are dropped onto the conveyor to make room for a new empty pouch.
“It’s excellent truly state-of-the-art” Ingemi says. “The principle of continuous motion filling for spouted pouches is cutting edge. Everything just fell in place. At the end of the day we really did believe that this spouted pouch represented something truly significant for the beverage community and we wanted to be part of it.”
The room that houses the filling machine was built to accommodate a pharmaceutical product should the opportunity to contract package a pharmaceutical arise. For now the separate room “just makes a nice very clean environment for the filler” Ingemi says.
A conveyor runs out of the filling room to a Mettler Toledo checkweigher. If the pouch weight isn’t right it’s kicked off the line to a container off the conveyor. From the checkweigher pouches are conveyed to a Videojet coder. After pouches are date-coded they are hand packed into cases that are sealed by an Interpack carton sealer from Intertape Polymer Group. Cartons are conveyed past another Videojet coder before they are hand palletized and shipped.
“It’s a fairly simple product flow” Ingemi says. “We intentionally made it that way. It gives us the greatest degree of flexibility. The machine can do up to 250 pouches per minute but right now we’re probably running at about ‘half speed’ as we continue through our start-up curve and optimize our downstream packaging operation. We’re not yet at capacity but we will be.”
For more on the graphic design of the Energice line see: packworld.com/go/x126
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