Technology opens a door at P&G

By hitching its wagon to that increasingly bright star called servo technology, P&G gains flexibility, increased capacity, and better utilization of equipment assets.

Shown at left is P&G's Gross Gerau tube filler during a break. A robot inserts tubes 20 at a time into pockets in the portion of
Shown at left is P&G's Gross Gerau tube filler during a break. A robot inserts tubes 20 at a time into pockets in the portion of

If throughput on your toothpaste packaging lines is constrained and flexibility lacking, what do you do? If you’re Procter & Gamble and you’re analyzing tube-filling capabilities at your plant in Gross Gerau, Germany, you launch Project Front Door.

“It’s like opening a door to a new era of production efficiency by adding flexibility, rapid changeover, and higher speeds,” says process engineer Bjorn Kinze.

Emerging from Project Front Door was a new tube-filling line, running at Gross Gerau since May, that is powered largely by servo technology. For example, tube filling, cartoning, bundling, and case packing on the new line are done by four machines whose motors, all 54 of them, are all servo motors supplied by Elau.

Most impressive is the tube filler, an IWKA Model TFS-80-4. It has 29 servo motors and as many complementary drives, also from Elau. Controlling all the tube picking, loading, orienting, filling, heating, sealing, and discharging that is executed by these motors are two Elau PacDrive controllers, each capable of governing motion, logic, and HMI. Connecting each controller to its assigned servo drives is a SERCOS fiber optic network.

According to Elau, a single PacDrive controller on the TFS-80-4 would actually suffice. But early in the machine’s design phase, IWKA engineers decided to use two controllers to ensure maximum performance. Each controller is in charge of half the machine’s axes of motion.

Objective accomplished

A key objective of Project Front Door was high-speed filling. The IWKA TFS-80-4 delivers, though P&G declines to quantify.

“We run almost twice as many tubes per minute on this system compared to the older lines here in this plant,” says P&G maintenance supervisor Thorsten May. The older fillers are all controlled by a conventional PLC and rely on a mechanical drive/clutch/

brake approach; the only servo motors involved are the two that are used to orient the tube.

Benefits gained from the new filler go far beyond increased speed, says May, as changeover is greatly improved, too.

IWKA, which built the TFS-80 tube filling series in direct response to customer demand, is just as pleased as P&G with its latest foray into servo-drive technology.

“The flexibility gained is tremendous,” says Axel Augenstein, key accounts manager at IWKA. “In older tube fillers that were fundamentally mechanical in nature, you had to change mechanical cams when changing to a new tube size or product formula. With a servo-based system, you store product formats in the controller and select them from a menu displayed on the HMI screen. The filler then automatically adjusts to the new cam profile.”

“A changeover may or may not include change parts,” says Kinze. “But either way, we do it in record time. It permits us to change when the market tells us, not when our equipment will allow us to.” Changeovers typically are either from one flavor to another or from a 50-mL (1.7-oz) to a 125-mL (4.23-oz) tube.

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