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A range of products is available that has particularly been designed to meet your requirements on gravimetric filling of containers from 1 kg to 3,000 kg. You can choose from a variety of semi-automatic and fully automatic filling machines. We can offer complete systems for fully automatic packaging processes through the combination of filling equipment with our conveyor and palletising system.
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The drum, available in a variety of internationally standardised designs, has world-wide best proven to distribute liquid and pasty products. Today, the distribution of liquid and pasty products for industrial use or application is hardly feasible without the use of 200 l drums! They simply fulfil all demands on safe transport and storage of even dangerous goods and foods.
However, automatic drum filling such as on Feige drum fillers, always includes a logistic challenge: A Feige drum filler, for example, positions, de-bungs, fills, re-bungs and seals up to 120 bung-type steel drums (216.5 l) per hour, all fully automatically.
The same amount of empty drums must be available per hour - and the amount even multiplies with the number of installed drum fillers!
Where to put all those drums?
The drums will be directly unloaded from the lorry onto a telescopic boom conveyor which moves the drums to a roller conveyor. This roller conveyor can directly move the drums to the drum filler. In this case, drum supply and drum filling would be combined. Only those drums could be filled that have just been unloaded. But in most cases such a direct dependency is not wanted, rather do the filling companies aim at a temporary storage with drum type classification.
In general, there are two possibilities of drum storage: In case of sufficient space storage roller conveyors receive the drums according to the lorry unloading speed and supply them as required in cycled operation to the drum filler.
For a restricted area, an empty drum silo which can take 900 to 3000 drums depending on the design, offers the required storage function. The integrated silo stacker stacks the 200 l drums in rows within the single cells. The stacker is also used for the removal from stock when the drums should be supplied to the filling equipment.
Rationalise manual unload
Manual drum handling requires sufficient physical strength, an empty drum weighs at least about 20 kg, and appropriate recreation of the personnel, not to forget the aspect of operational safety. Already at an early stage Feige has developed an automatic system for drum unloading aiming at humanising and rationalising the workflow.
The unloading robot moves on chains into the lorry and stops short before reaching the drum rows to be unloaded. Vacuum gripper extend and contact the drum shells. Afterwards, the robot moves back to the base position and places one drum row after the other onto the roller conveyor which is located between the lorry and the robot's base position. This system, however, is limited to only a few fields of application due to different lorry types and different loading and unloading modes.
Why not pallet loading?
The CP3 and the CP9 pallet with the dimensions 1140 x 1140 mm has particularly been designed for charging pallets with drums. Three pallets with four drums each will reach a stacking height of about 3.1 m. This is too high to bring this stack into standard vehicles.
Only low-floor vehicles with elevating roof which is closed while running enable the triple stacking height for road transport. A forklift truck will then unload the pallets after the lorry has arrived at the filling company. This helps to eliminate a good part of labour intensive and heavy work.
A reusable plastic pallet system is highly efficient for the transport and the storage of steel drums. This system consists of a stable deep-drawn 4-way pallet with two light slip sheets. The contours of the pallet and the slip sheets provide for a positive locking between drums and pallet. In this way, 12 empty drums can safely be placed on a surface of 1200 x 1200 mm in the stack, protected from dents or paint damage. As the slip sheets are not very thick, the pallets can be loaded onto a conventional lorry.
Apart from the benefit of increasing the quality, this system offers exact positioning of the empty drums to the contours of the pallet which enables the use of automatic handling devices.
Four drums each that have been produced every 4.5 seconds can automatically be inserted into the plastic pallet system. Using a simple pallet hand truck, the lorry driver puts the stack with three layers and four drums each into the lorry and unloads the stack on site. The triple pallet stacks will then be stored on pallet conveyors according to drum classification. An automatic storage management system can be added.
Thanks to exact drum positioning, an articulated robot is able to unstack the drums fully automatically and to place them on roller conveyors which feed the drums to the drum fillers.
In case of pallet fillers where the drums will be filled on pallets, the robot can even exactly position the drums on CP3 or CP9 pallets. Having unstacked the drum rows, the robot will put down the slip sheets and the pallet. These sets of slip sheets and pallets can again be stacked so that the return from the filling company to the drum manufacturer will not require much space.
"This system of empty drum logistics is certainly forward looking!", says the factory manager of the central filling department of a well named chemical company. "Even without automatic unstacking this system offers excellent storage possibilities as a fork lift truck can simply put two triple stacks one above the other". In this way, even 24 drums can safely be placed on a surface of 1.200 x 1.200 mm.
