equipment - liquid packaging

Maximize productivity with pre-feeders

The untimed bottom feeder of a flamesealer relies on friction of the feed belts to draw and propel carton blanks into the machine.  Under the constantly changing feed pile height, these feed belts expand or compress.  As blanks feed off the bottom of the pile, the weight on the feed belts decreases and the belts expand.  This decreases the gap between the feed belts and the feed gate which causes skips to occur.

Conversely, when too many blanks are placed in the feed hopper, the feed belts compress, increasing the gap between the feed belts and the feed gate, which causes doubles to feed.

Skips and double blanks can twist and jam in the flamesealer causing scrap, machine stoppages and other production delays.  If a double blank does make it through the feed, it will most likely upset the flow of blanks into the stacker. 

Typically, flame-sealed cartons run at very high speeds and stoppages can be dramatic.  A high-speed jam usually takes a longer time to clear, can cause physical damage to the machine, and results in higher scrap rates.

Since a prefeeder delivers separated blanks to the flamesealer feed hopper, there is no need to fan or otherwise manually pre-condition the blanks.  The operator simply sets a stack height sensor (mounted in the flamesealer feed hopper) to the optimum stack height.  As the speed of the flamesealer changes, the prefeeder's drive responds accordingly - either speeding up or slowing down  - and maintains a constant carton stack height in the hopper.

Feeder types

Uni-Feeder 1612

This small format pre-feeder is ideal for pre-feeding blank sizes typically used in the liquid packaging industry.

Half feeder

The Automatic Half Feeder is designed to feed in a fully automatic mode stacks of printed and die cut carton blanks up to a height of 60 cm.

The carton stacks to be sealed are placed on the infeed conveyor of the Half Feeder. Depending on length of the half-feed conveyor, which is variable as well as depending on the size of blanks, a certain number of carton stacks can be staged one behind the other. The carton stacks are placed mechanically into the feed hopper of the pre-feed unit.

The pre-feed unit serves the purpose to go from a stack mode into a shingle mode to separate each blank and to be introduced into the feed hopper of the sealer, maintaining an even stack height in the feed hopper. As soon as the stack of carton blanks is reduced by the feeding action down to 20%, a new stack is automatically lifted into the pre-feed hopper, and so forth.

Depending on your configuration of the material flow, carton stacks to be processed can be conveyed automatically direct from the printing press or placed by hand or by forklift on the infeed conveyor of the Half Feeder

Auto feeder

An automatic high-speed feeder for quart, liter and fractional cartons ...

• feeds carton blanks directly from special skids to the flame sealer feed hopper
• maintains a constant stack height in feed hopper regardless of flame sealer speed
• increases life of flame sealer feed belts
• uniform feeding increases production by reducing carton-to-carton spacing in the sealer
• flame sealer speed is not limited by hand feeding
• reduces scrap, scuffing and down time
• eliminates skips and doubles caused by improper hand feeding
• automatically stacks empty skids for easy removal by fork lift

liquid packaging equipment