The company delivers complete, tailor-made production lines to ice cream producers and other food-processing firms looking for flexible integrated solutions. These range from individual assembly lines to complete production plants and comprise equipment for moulding, extrusion, filling, wrapping and packing as well as freezers, ingredient feeders and remanufacturing and upgrade kits. Product formats handled include stick ice, cone, sandwich, bulk & cup and dessert/cake.

The company's latest automated packing solution, the GCS, uses flex picker robots to deliver products into cartons with both flexibility and speed. At the heart of the machine is an Allen-Bradley automation, motion and safety solution from Rockwell Automation.

The GCS machine has been developed specifically for the packaging of ice creams. It takes individually wrapped ice creams fed on a conveyor from a preceding Gram production machine and then places a predefined number and pattern (colour/flavour mix) into cardboard boxes.

The automation solution has to control a number of features, including the automatic balancing of different product flavours, simultaneous production of different multi-flavour packs, simultaneous production of different pack patterns and easy changeover between different pack/carton sizes and pattern formats, with minimal intervention. All of which has to be done at a speed that does not cause a bottleneck to other processes.

This type of product/packaging variety and speed demands extremely tight integration of all facets of the automation and motion infrastructure, as well as effective interoperability with the safety system, other automation assets within the line and the enterprise solution at the plant.

Integration

Anders G. Torbensen, vice president sales & marketing at Gram Equipment, says: “This machine has been designed to integrate as effectively as possible with other Gram Equipment machines in production lines, so we made the decision to develop an automation and motion solution based on Allen-Bradley products. We saw many advantages to having the same control system as those on the rest of line, especially in terms of operational integration, spares and maintenance.”

The GCS has an Allen-Bradley ControlLogix programmable automation controller (PAC). Depending on how many robots the GCS system has (two or four), the number of controlled axes varies; the biggest GCS system has 31 Allen-Bradley Kinetix 5700 servo-drive-controlled axes and six Allen-Bradley PowerFlex 525 variable-frequency drive-controlled axes.

Three servo drives are used for each delta robot (XYZ movement) with an additional drive used to rotate the tool. Two servo drives are used for the carton carrier, two for the carton outlet and two for the box stop. Four servo drives provide the product movement on the pocket conveyor, another four are used for the product infeed and four for the pullnose (product drop). The six PowerFlex variable-frequency drives are used for carton infeed and product receiving.

Completing the control infrastructure is a safety solution running on EtherNet/IP that leverages Guard ControlLogix with Allen-Bradley Safety POINT I/O, which can be placed locally where it´s needed to achieve maximum flexibility and modularity in production lines. Both the PowerFlex and Kinetix drives also communicate over EtherNet/IP and leverage CIP Safety functionality. Safety data is transmitted using the same wires and IP addresses as the motion and control data, an infrastructure which helps to reduce overall system wiring.

These solutions have enabled Gram Equipment to develop a machine capable of processing up to 660 products per minute with up to four different product flavours in each layer.

Capable of handling stick, bars and sandwich formats, the line design is flexible enough to fit existing production facilities and its small footprint efficiently exploits the limited space available.

Gram Equipment is a member of the Rockwell Automation PartnerNetwork program as an OEM Program Participant. Through the use of Rockwell Automation products, technology and industry expertise, these PartnerNetwork members help end users achieve sustainability and safety-compliance objectives.