This content was written and submitted by the supplier. It has only been modified to comply with this publication’s space and style.
The Syntegon Distribution Continuous Slide (DCS) discharge station for round cookies, crackers, and biscuits consists of one or more stations arranged one behind the other and equipped with belt slides for gentle handling, minimizing mechanical stress and reducing product breakage and loss. Providing optimum pack style flexibility, the Syntegon DCS distributes cookies onto belt legs for packing them flat or on-edge into pile, slug, or tray packs.
Cookies, biscuits, and crackers are taken from the cooling conveyor and are continuously distributed to the leg belts. The products slide over the belts and are protected from any mechanical stress. This reduces product loss significantly and leads to efficiency gains, especially when handling particularly sensitive products.
The higher the speed of the belt slide, the more cookies are transferred to downstream leg belts. On the individual legs, a further belt slide, arranges the straight product stream into an S-shape. This arrangement ensures the cookies and crackers are evenly distributed across the entire width of the belt, preventing them from wedging or overlapping. A homogeneous product stream is created, ensuring a constant feed to the packaging machine.
The smart design of the Syntegon DCS provides high format flexibility; no format parts are installed in the discharge station. For a format change, it is sufficient to modify the belt speeds via the HMI module and save them as a new format. With flat feeders, chicane conveyors arrange the products into columns and feed them to the packaging machine in a constant product stream. With on-edge handling, products are gently transported by vibration to the packaging leg in ZF vibratory channels.
The DCS discharge station requires shorter vibratory channel lengths than conventional solutions to achieve the same storage times. In addition, manufacturers can add further DCS stations to the discharge system on a modular basis. In this manner, larger production volumes can be handled if the oven capacity is expanded at a later date.
Thanks to the well-designed conveyors used within the DCS, additional safety guarding is not necessary. Since cleaning requires only a few manual steps, downtimes are reduced. Operators can easily view each process step and reach all machine sections for maintenance purposes.
