Packaging

At first glance, a filling application involving the transport of a liquid product into a solid vessel may seem simple to the untrained eye. But what few people realize is the high accuracy and continuous feed rates required for such high precision and high speed applications.

The aspect of ensuring that the control of the filling nozzle is completely synchronized with the rotational conveyor and flow controller is the challenge for most bottle filling applications. The controller has to ensure that the liquid is fed accurately into the bottle opening. The flow rate and nozzle height also have to be precisely controlled to eliminate the risk of frothing and overflow of the liquid itself.

By using Mitsubishi Electric's motion controller CPU (based on the iQ Platform), cam profiles can be controlled intelligently with software caming systems that replace hardware based methods which are prone to error and profile deviation.

In addition to the motion controller, the actual transfer and conveyor aspects of the application can be controlled using Mitsubishi Electric's intelligent and energy saving drives. These are integrated into the total system via the open device level network CC-Link. The fast rates of bottles being fed into the machine can be controlled by the System Q together with a CC-Link network, offering high transmission speeds of 1 Gigabit with program speeds in the milliseconds. The System Q also enables connectivity to upper level control and management systems via its Ethernet option module allowing real-time production data to be fed into ERP/MES systems.