A manufacturer using neck-banding machines to wrap a plastic protective wrap around the cap of bottles preventing tampering used relatively low-cost machines that had to meet stringent speed requirements. The challenge was to upgrade the quality while still reducing costs.

The fiercely competitive bottling industry chose the P7000 Powermax system because it provided significant value over the competition due to its multi-stepping feature that significantly upgraded machine performance. It also had a current reduction facility to lower power consumption outperforming the competition while being a smaller package and having a more economical price.

The system was selected because by resorting to basic and simple methods, doing the analysis and calculating the actual torque requirements for all the machine web sizes. A single motor was then selected for all axis, so simplifying specifications, drawings and purchasing. The overall costs came in lower than the incumbent system by using the ‘right-size’ and not over-sized motors, and also due to their dynamic smoothing and extreme smoothing capability. The idle-current-reduction mode of the P7000 was an additional advantage of the drives.

The customer’s automatic heat-shrink labelling machines utilise state-of-the-art programmable controllers, real time machine monitoring systems with user friendly Operator Interface Terminals (OIT) to make operation and maintenance easy and simple. The simple to interface P7000 has been easily integrated and so quality of the product is far superior. The accurate placement of the banding has reduced rejects and saved on wastage so that the production costs have shown significant savings.

Micromech is the leading UK distributor for Danaher Motion, if you want to know more about these exciting drives then contact Alan Spinks on 01376 333333 or email alan@micromech.co.uk

‘Affordable Automation’