Automatic Change-Over? A matter of skill

With glasstec now past and counted as a success, the Zecchetti RBR T-PAL line shown at the exhibition will be installed and running on premises to demonstrate the many benefits of the Automatic Change- Over facility.

The new RBR T-PAL machine was presented at glasstec 2014 and Zecchetti is proud to say it has attracted a great deal of interest from established and would-be customers alike. For this reason, the line displayed at the booth will be installed and running on Zecchetti premises to allow people who could not attend the exhibition to see it during the months to follow. We would like to publicly thank our customers who have trusted us over the years and appreciated our work, in particular regarding the improvements and innovations that our R&D department constantly studies, designs and makes real. Specifically, the running principle of the machine is the ability of palletizing rows of bottles instead of the complete layer, by picking up the rows directly from the feeding conveyors and depositing them onto the pallet inside the centering unit. Such a process allows operators to eliminate critical areas such as layer formation table and stacking. The main feature of the RBR T-PAL is the Automatic Change- Over facility. Combined with the conveyors provided with an automatic adjustability of the side guides, such a machine allows opera tors to move from one format to another by simply calling the relevant recipe through the Supervision System. In this way, problems and lost time related to the format change-over are eliminated. The palletizing head is provided with pickup pincers coated with 50 shore vulcanized rubber which means: safe bottle holding and no need of changing the pincers (as it happens with the inflating tubes) when changing format. The head compacts the picked up rows, bringing them to the right pitch and depositing them onto the pallet already in the right setting, which guarantees their stability. A special centering unit guarantees a constant control and a safe and careful squaring of the bottle rows, the bottle layers and the layer separators. The main mast is provided with last generation linear guides with sphere recirculation; asynchronous servo motors for the main axis control permit perfect movements and stops as well as braking energy recovery. Transmissions operate via toothed belts. The same Automatic Change- Over facility was applied to the Depalletizing Head, fitted on an antropomorphous 4-axis robot, which was provided with  a pickup pincer moving single rows of bottles and synchronized with the bottle conveyor indexing. Important features of this application are:
• non-stop indexing of the bottle conveyor even during the deposit of bottles being depalletized, which means no bottle accumulation
• self-adaptation of the robot to possible row misalignments, which considerably increases efficiency.
Both the above systems are particularly indicated, but not limited to, for handling frosted/ decorated bottles (or “SPECIALSHAPE” containers). Once again, the success of our presence at glasstec rewards our efforts to make life easier for the glassworks’ operators and to minimize downtimes and energy use.