Vertical Form Fill & Seal application

Description


Application: The machine forms, fills and seals a package.

Application areas: This application is frequently used in the food and beverage industry. This includes high-speed applications such as packaging of sweets and confectionery as well as lower speed applications such as filling and sealing of coffee. The machine supplies the material (typically dry goods such as cereals or snacks), fills it into prepared bags and seals the bags.

Function: The machine supplies film for the package from a roll which is formed into a bag over a cylinder. A servo motor on the roll ensures constant film tension. This reduces the amount of scrap since the length of film used for each bag is always identical.                  Two supply units with servo motors form the bag with the length set by the operator. When the lower end of the bag is formed, the material is filled from the top (gravity principle). Many high-speed machines use several supply mechanisms to ensure that the same amount of material is filled into the bag over the entire length of the cylinder.
A press closes the bag at the bottom before it is filled. At the end of the process, the bag is sealed and cut off.

Solution

The Lexium 05 servo drive with integrated velocity and torque mode is the ideal solution for the implementation of this type of machine. Typical configuration:

  • One servo drive for the roll which operates in torque mode
  • Two servo drives to supply the film for the bags
  • One servo drive for pressing/cutting as master which runs in velocity mode
  • The two supply mechanisms follow the cycle of the pressing/cutting unit via a cam profile


BSH servo motors are used for all axes. These servo motors are compact, have a low moment of inertia and offer superior dynamic characteristics. The Lexium 05 servo drive automatically reads the motor parameters each time it is switched on, i.e. no additional configuration is required.

All drives communicate via CANopen Motionbus. All motions in the process are synchronized by a Lexium Motion Controller (LMC). The production cycle is set via parameters in the motion controller. The pressing/cutting unit follows this cycle. The cam profiles of the supply mechanisms depend dynamically on such production parameters as bag length, consistency of the product, etc.
The operator can monitor and change the production parameters via a Magelis HMI terminal which is connected to the Lexium Motion Controller (LMC) via Ethernet.

Products used:

  • Lexium Motion Controller (LMC),
  • Lexium 05 Servo Drives