Packaging – I trust you!

If you open a new package of sausage for break­fast, enjoy a soft-boiled egg along with it and break open a fresh bottle of juice, after which you take a pill for that headache that is both­ering you before starting work, you do all this without reser­va­tion. You auto­mat­i­cally trust the air-tight plastic tray, the vit­amin-pro­tecting glass bottle or the sterile blister pack – germs don’t have a chance. By impli­ca­tion: pack­aging means safety.

But to make sure that food, bev­er­ages or ­phar­ma­ceu­tical prod­ucts can be con­sumed without wor­ries, pack­aging machinery and plants must meet the same require­ment: being 100 % safe. A task that is quite tricky. The pack­aging industry is an inno­v­a­tive driver and fore­runner within the automa­tion and engi­neering industry with regard to digi­ti­sa­tion and net­working machinery. How is it thereby pos­sible to pro­tect against manip­u­la­tion? At the same time, orders are becoming more cus­tomised, ­prod­ucts are more fre­quently pack­aged indi­vid­u­ally and machines should be able to be set to dif­ferent pack­aging vari­ants within the shortest time. How can con­sis­tent safety be guar­an­teed with high flex­i­bility? And finally, the demand for sus­tain­able pack­aging solu­tions con­tinues to increase, and rising prices of raw mate­rials and supply bot­tle­necks are also neg­a­tively affecting plan­ning sta­bility. So how is an effi­cient, easy to operate imple­men­ta­tion of safety pos­sible without long down­times?

The right package – safety & security

Intel­li­gent automa­tion con­cepts tai­lored to the chal­lenges of the pack­aging industry not only make com­plete pro­duc­tion lines and com­pact case erec­tors, for example, safer, they also make them easier to operate, less prone to failure and, ulti­mately, more pro­duc­tive. Safety here not only means the pro­tec­tion of oper­a­tors from haz­ards ema­nating from the machine, but also the pro­tec­tion of plant and machinery against ­people, manip­u­la­tion and incor­rect oper­a­tion – also called indus­trial secu­rity.

Both branched bottle filling plants as well as com­pact pack­aging machinery have to varying extents guard locking, covers, flaps, gates and drives. Var­ious degrees of risk are con­cealed here which man­u­fac­turers and oper­a­tors must face in accor­dance with the Machinery Direc­tive. Fur­ther­more, the inter­na­tion­ally valid EN ISO 14119 (inter­locking devices) must also be observed. A par­tic­ular emphasis is placed here on manip­u­la­tion secu­rity; a risk eval­u­a­tion is to be cre­ated for each inter­locking device

With its com­pre­hen­sive port­folio of ser­vices and prod­ucts and solu­tions cov­ering sensor, ­con­trol and drive tech­nology plus visu­al­i­sa­tion as well as diag­nos­tics, Pilz is a reli­able partner for automa­tion and safety in the pack­aging industry. Whether a new devel­op­ment, plant retrofit or a con­ver­sion of the mate­rial feed: Pilz offers both man­u­fac­turers and oper­a­tors of plants scal­able and flex­ible automa­tion and safety solu­tions from one source which also meet the require­ments of EN ISO 14119. What they all have in common: they pro­tect users, reduce machinery fail­ures and thus increase the pro­duc­tivity of plants. Because they have major influ­ence on the per­for­mance, man­age­ability and flex­i­bility of a plant. Experts from Pilz will advise you on the nec­es­sary safety con­cept for each machine.

Safely into the bottle!

An example: A plant for filling and pack­aging 44,000 square PET bot­tles per hour is to be designed and auto­mated for the largest Italian bot­tler of min­eral water. ACMI S.p.A., a man­u­fac­turer of end-of-line sys­tems and packing plants, faced this task and devel­oped a com­plex plant com­prising inter­linked machines. Pilz took on the risk assess­ment and devel­oped the nec­es­sary safety mea­sures to ensure safe inter­ac­tion of the machines – nat­u­rally in com­pli­ance with the latest stan­dards and including pro­duc­tive processes.

The result: Mon­i­toring of the safety func­tions is per­formed by the con­fig­urable small con­troller PNOZ­multi 2 that com­mu­ni­cates with the plant automa­tion system via PROFINET. Coded, non-con­tact safety switches PSEN­code pre­vent manip­u­la­tion and ensure that the min­imum ­dis­tance is main­tained. “The risk assess­ment ­per­formed by Pilz experts formed the basis for the safe con­struc­tion of our plant as well as for the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of suit­able pro­tec­tive mea­sures. Pilz’s exper­tise when it comes to machinery safety then enabled us to imple­ment the nec­es­sary mea­sures our­selves,” says Gian­luca ­Con­tesso, safety product man­ager at ACMI S.p.A.

Pure enjoyment

Together with its cus­tomer, Pilz uses its solu­tions indi­vid­u­ally tai­lored to the pack­aging industry to pro­tect plants against machine stand­still and guar­an­tees high avail­ability across the entire pack­aging process. Pack­aging machines and plants are pro­tected against manip­u­la­tion and external inter­fer­ence so that con­sumers can con­tinue enjoying their break­fast without any con­cerns!