A large producer of barite in Nevada was seeking a bag filling system to fill 100 lb valve bags at a rate of 1,000 bags per hour. The producer has been using impeller-style fillers from another machinery manufacturer that had proven to be unreliable, suffered constant unexpected downtime, and required a high amount of maintenance. The maintenance was due largely to the fact that the manufacturer had incorrectly specified impeller packers for the application. The high bulk density of the material (130 Lb Cu Ft) and the natural characteristics of the material caused the motor to drive over-amp, burn up and fail prematurely.
Additionally, the shaft seals of the machines they were using continuously leaked and needed to be repacked on a regular basis resulting in downtime. The client was seeking a packaging solution that could achieve the target fill rate with spillage of the product while at the same time solving the reliability and maintenance issues.
To achieve the client’s objectives, CBE designed a system with three (2) of its Model 730 Pressure Flow Air Packers integrated with an automatic valve bag placer. The Model 730 had several distinct advantages for the application. First, each of the three (3) machines was capable of filling 5 bags per minute (10 BPM total) each which would easily meet the production requirement. Second, because the Model 730 uses a fluidizing air slide to convey the material and has no internal moving parts, no motors driving mechanical blades or flights shafts, maintenance was greatly reduced.
The fluidizing system within the Model 730 both conditioned and made fluidized the material as it transferred through the machine and out into the bag. The result was a clean bag fill with superb weight accuracy with total bag fill cycle times of less than 10 seconds per bag filled.
All facets of system operation were completely automated including bag placing, bag filling, and bag discharge. Filled bags were automatically discharged onto a specially designed receiving conveyor and conveyed to a robotic bag palletizer for bag palletizing. A specially designed PLC control system featuring a gain-in-weight totalizing display controlled all filling and weighing functions as well as interfaced with the robotic bag placer. The controls were designed with the ability to communicate weight data to a printer or central management control system.
The system provided a high level of productivity and changeover to different product grades was effortless with the integrated digital weighing scale by which an operator could key in target weight in a couple of keystrokes.
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