Nowadays, the organised filling of liquid building materials, as e.g. dispersion/Latex paint and plasters has to cover a big complexity because of its wide variety of products and their different sorts of containers to be filled. Especially those companies which have continuously grown up over the years require a “taylor-made suit” to build up fully professional production plants. This case study of Messrs. Swiss Lack is a typical example for such a demanding task.
Most of the production plants of dispersion/Latex- and liquid plaster have continuously grown up over the years. When planning and extenting such plants, the main focus is always layed on the
location and arrangement of mixers in which the products are composed and the storage tanks for temporary product storage.
When designing the plant, the production planners also have to mind the raw-material supply into these tanks. Production of dispersion paints and of liquid plasters is done in batch-operation. This means: a mixer is supplied with raw-material and the “batch” is stirred. The mixers and storage tanks mostly have a volume of 2,5 to 10 tons. There are often 30 different sorts of containers in just one production plant.
Actually, the market demands a huge diversity of products. This requires different ways of pro-duction. The whole range of paints runs from housepaint and interior paints up to primers, that one of plasters from house-plaster and decoration plasters up to interior plasters. These different sorts of products are finally mixed with various shades of colours – and now we have the perfect chaotic situation in production !
What is more: production in different quantities and different pail sizes. For instance, there is a mass-produce and fill of white dispersion colours, whereby pails with pigmented colours some-times have batch sizes of merely one piece.
These so-called frame conditions form the basis and create a challenge to the manufacturer of filling machinery. As the local situation does vary from producer to producer, each customer needs a “taylor-made suit”. The general task is summarized as follows:
In the past years, Feige Filling specialists have successfully solved the task “How does the product get into the pail?” with all well-known producers of construction materials.
Messrs. Swiss Lack in Zurich (nowadays part of the Akzo Nobel group) desperately looked for a filling solution to optimize their production process, just to find a way out from the dead-end-street.
The North German supplier Feige found an optimum solution to cover all circumstances. Thus,
the production of dispersion paint had been divided into two areas:
Line 1: High-speed filler with high degree of automatisation
Line 2: Multi-functional filler with shading and smaller batch sizes
The high-speed filling line starts with the automatic denesting of pails. It follows the online-printing. The operator can easily modify the layout of the print design via the modeller on the PC. The pail’s surface is being heated up and the print image is put on. Thus, printing and storing of label-rolls is omitted.
Line 1 comprises 4 (four) filling stations with 4 scale bases and filling valves. These filling valves are directly connected to 4 mixers resp. storage tanks. The operator selects on the scale display the tank resp. the scale base which is supposed to do the fill. The software RFill accelerates and slows the fill process at an optimum so that a filling capacity of up to 600 pails per hour (each 20 ltrs.) can be achieved. After this high-speed fill the pails are automatically provided with a lid and closed tightly.
The palletizing robot is able to adjust itself to different container sizes (5 ltrs., 15 ltrs, 18 ltrs and 20 ltrs.), different pail arrangement schemes and number of layers and, palletises the filled containers in cycles tuned to seconds. Advancing the filled containers for removal to the storage logistics is current routine.
Line 2 has been designed as multi-function filler and its four (4) fill places are coupled to 20 mixing and storage tanks. Each fill place has got one filling valve, which can be connected to one of the five neighbouring product pipes. The operating personnel connects the filling valve to the required product pipe via a union nut. The operator feeds the automatically denested pails to the provided activated fill place. Filling is done even more precisely than the W & M fault limits do demand it. This ensures that the subsequent pigmentising produces an optimal reproducible colour shade. Pigmentising is done via four shadings placed in serie to which the containers are coming automatically. The homogenious distribution of the paint-particles in the basis-paint is done by two stirring devices.
During stirring the pail is turned in the opposite direction (for example: stirring goes clockwise – pail is turned anti-clockwise). This is good for the paint on the pail’s edge to get mixed, too.
The automatic lid placing and lid pressing is done automatically and makes also this flexible filler become a fully automatic packaging line.
So, let’s summarize:
Thanks to Feige Filling great experience in the field of project planning and development & realisation of filling machines in the dispersion colour- and liquid plaster production, there are always good solu-tion models to develop to fill pails.
The wide complexity of the task which is generated by
Every solution you may find will always be a compromise, either way. But to keep compromises very low, you should in no way neglect the fill process being the last “brick in the wall” of your production chain. This important issue has to be involved in the production planning or retrofit process straight from the very beginning. A greenfield planning is always the best !
- starting with raw-material arrival
- ending up with truck departure.
