PALLET CONVEYOR AND ROBOTIC PALLESTING

With the palletised cans being transported to beverage plants across Europe, the production process uses various sized pallets depending on the destination country. The solution needed to cater for the full range of pallet options and offer a smooth process to transport them safely and seamlessly from the production line palletisers to an outfeed adjacent to the warehouse. The palletised stacks of cans would pass through an integrated compression strapping machine to provide the necessary stability during transit, so it was important that L-A-C’s solution also ensured that the strap positioning would be in the correct order and consistent so that the pallets would be stable enough for transportation.
 

An inspection & labelling station was required for quality control prior to either storage or shipment of each pallet and would require a platform around the visual inspection area for operators to fully view the pallet in a safe environment and allow them to affix product and destination labels. The waste aluminium bales provided an additional challenge due to their varying sizes and weight, around 30kg per bale. Furthermore, there were two types of cans to be processed; bright (clear) aluminium and decorated material which differ in weight, size and processing speeds, with an additional requirement for a rejection line to handle substandard bales.

Across the production facility at the waste aluminium handling area, L-A-C devised a fully automated solution involving an ABB Robotic Arm capable of measuring and stacking the bales onto a carrying pallet ready to be taken off-site for recycling. 

Offcuts and damaged aluminium from the production process are collated and crushed to form rectangular bales which need to measure a certain size to be picked up by the ABB robot and stacked onto a carrier pallet. Therefore, once the bales arrive at the station via L-A-C’s heavy-duty belt conveyor, the ABB robot measures each bale to ensure they comply with the size requirements. If they measure correctly, the robot will pick up the bale and place it on the pallet to create a fully stacked pallet of 28 bales in just one hour. 

Any non-conforming bales can be rejected via a turntable roller conveyor, which turns the bale by 90 degrees and is then taken away on a rubber belt conveyor. The full pallet weighing up to 1000kg is then transported by a further line of heavy-duty chain conveyor to a strapping machine which applies 10 straps per stack to create a highly stable pallet. The final phase before despatch to the recycling facility involves each stack being weighed and recorded at the check weighing station.

The design & integration of the L-A-C systems has provided Ball Corporation with robust and reliable solutions for handling the stacks of palletised beverage cans and waste aluminium bales.
 

Supporting the customer’s continuous quest for safety and efficiency, the two fully automated solutions will optimise throughput rates, ensure safe pallet and product handling, improve traceability, and minimise the manual input required, resulting overall in enhanced operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.