Online weight control of powder products

With emphasis on cost control today, CIP (Continuous Improving Program) and CRP (Cost Reduction Program) have become the mantra of corporate managers. Because product weight is directly related to cost control, how to avoid overweight products to ensure profit under the premise of complying with related laws and regulations has become a focus issue. This article gives you a detailed description of how a detergent manufacturer successfully saved 6 million a year by using METTLER TOLEDO's GARVENS automatic checkweigher to fully and dynamically measure product weight! It is hoped that it will be helpful for manufacturers of powder bag products that also want to strictly control the weight accuracy of the product and reduce the production cost.

For customers, products that are short of goods are not allowed. However, if the output is large, the powder in the packaging machine loading system is also affected by the humidity. The packaging accuracy is fluctuating and negative deviations are difficult to avoid. Therefore, we must increase the filling material, plus 5% per package, to ensure that there is no less heavy product. This makes the company pay a very high cost. METTLER TOLEDO recommends the use of an automatic checkweigher to solve this problem and ensure that each bag is within the explicit weight tolerances.
In addition, if the customer's production plant is very crowded, how to install the checkweigher without affecting the existing production process, existing equipment layout? After several on-site inspections and measurements, METTLER TOLEDO provided the following solution for a detergent manufacturer:

The original production status of a detergent factory:

After the products are packaged into bags by an automatic packaging machine, they fall on a transitional conveyor belt, and the products are sent by the belt to another product conveying line arranged vertically. The finished product conveyor line is 1 meter wide and is responsible for the delivery of finished products from 3 different automatic packaging machines.

According to the weight sampling data of a product on site, we can get two statistical charts. Product target weight 350g.
From the chart below, we can see that in order to avoid as much as possible in the product, the customer's actual average package weight is close to 360g, and the average number of cans per bag is 10g. For this product alone, the customer lost about 6 million yuan per year.

METTLER TOLEDO's solution:
1. Customize a round section of climbing belt and install it under the finished product outlet of the packaging machine. Pull apart the product, lift the product and transport the product to the checkweigher.
2. The checkweigher input, weighing, and output conveyors are 300mm, 500mm, and 1200mm long, respectively. The output conveyor crosses vertically on the finished conveyor line.
3. Install a pendulum-type reject device on the output conveyor. The oscillating rod is installed obliquely to the conveying direction. Under normal conditions, the qualified product will slide down the oscillating rod to the finished product conveying line; when unqualified products are detected, the oscillating rod will swing to the horizontal position in the conveying direction. The unqualified product will be The output conveyor is sent to the waste collection bin. The position of the pendulum lever can be adjusted according to the position of the packing machine, so that the products of the three packing machines are arranged in an orderly manner on the product conveying line.
4. Provide feedback control function. Once the product is found to be continuously light or continuously biased, a signal will be fed back to the packaging machine. The packaging machine will automatically adjust the filling amount according to the signal and correct the weight within the qualified range.
5. Provide RS232 interface to transfer the weight of each product to the computer. This data will be used to generate reports.
After the GARVENS automatic checkweigher was installed, statistics were made for the same product of 350g.
The average weight of the actual product at the time of production was 351.5 g. The checkweigher not only rejects products that are heavily underweight or overweight, but also provides real-time feedback of weight information to the packaging machine. The entire product weight distribution is more concentrated. It not only eliminates the heavy waste, but also greatly saves costs.

The main features of GARVENS checkweigher are:
â—†Product weight 100% detection.
â—† According to the weighing weight, the overweight and underweight feedback signal is sent to the front-end packaging machine.
â—† Field statistics and network connection analysis.
It is worth mentioning that METTLER TOLEDO also offers FreeWeigh.Net software. It can connect almost all METTLER TOLEDO products through the Internet. Such as balances, pH meters, checkweighers, and even metal detectors. Sampled data is stored in a database and can be viewed at any time, and can generate a variety of reports.

Source: Packaging Machinery