The drive towards greater automation and versatility is constant, and, here at Universal, it is apparent in the projects customers approach us with and how we adapt to them.
Not only have we noticed a greater volume of our projects are for automated filling and/or capping lines, but the level of versatility required is constantly increasing, too.
One such example is a project we completed at the end of December, for a well-known luxury cosmetics and fragrances brand.
The brief was to produce a line capable of filling numerous products with various fill volumes into a range of different containers. Capping had to be extremely versatile, too. Integrated crimping, screw-capping, and cap pressing systems enable the line to seal containers with soap pumps, spray pumps, decorative collars, or screw-on caps.
The outcome is a production line capable of handling hundreds of different products, containers, caps and fill volumes with the absolute minimum of change parts and downtime. A truly multi-purpose filling and capping system.
Containers are hand-placed into ‘pucks’ designed to match each container type. The external dimensions of these pucks remain the same from one container type to the next.
This greatly simplifies the bottle-handling process; and each container is automatically positioned for each stage without time-consuming gating adjustments.
After filling, the containers are transported to non-stop accessible area of the integrated conveyor system; where caps, pump-sprays or soap pumps are hand-placed before moving into the Posicrimp where crimped caps are secured, otherwise the containers bypass the crimping process.
Where the finished product does not have a crimped cap, the containers bypass the Posicrimp and move on to the Posicap screw-capper for tightening.
For crimped caps, the Posicap can be converted to a Collar Press to apply decorative collars and complete the capping process.
From here, the containers are transported to the collection conveyor where a robotic arm lifts them from their pucks and places them on a separate conveyor for collection. The pucks then return to the start of the process, ready to accept more containers in a continuous cycle.
A filling and capping system as versatile as this can handle entire product ranges and, as containers are updated, the pucks used can be updated to accommodate them.