Palamatic Supplies RotaSlit Automatic Sack Opener for HeIesi Silo Loading Upgrade
15.10.08
Helesi is a very successful company that designs, manufactures and supplies high quality, plastic injection moulding products to the waste management industry worldwide. In addition to plastic waste containers their product line includes pre-sorting waste bins, stadium seats and material handling plastic products such as pallets and pallet boxes, fish and food crates.
The company operates two, strategically located, state of the art production plants at Komotini, Northern Greece and Bradford, UK. A third production facility is under construction in Italy, Pisticci Scalo, Matera and is expected to be operational by Q3 2008.
When a Health and Safety assessment indicated that the manual handling of the plastic sacks within their processes was not conducive to good operator health, Helesi decided to upgrade the silo loading operation, from the manually fed rip and tip station they had, to a more automated and dust-tight solution to opening sacks.
Helesi's design specification was to include the existing product receiving hopper from the original station. From here, plastic granules are blown in to the hoppers through an existing system. Responding to an invitation to Tender, Palamatic Handling Systems Ltd of Chesterfield put forward a handling solution that included their RotaSlit fully automatic sack opening machine and vacuum tube lifter. The final agreed package included incorporating identical machines for both the Greek and UK facilities.
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| Image taken at Helesi in Bradford UK |
The RotaSlit has many benefits including;
- Hands free cutting system
- COSHH / Dust tight operation
- Minimal maintenance & easy clean-down
- 2 - 8 sacks per minute throughput
- Low running costs
- High emptying efficiency
- Improved house keeping
The vacuum tube lifter also removes all manual handling of the sacks from the process. Operators can now apply a vacuum grip to the upper sack surface and transfer them from pallet stack to infeed conveyor in a weightless process. The vacuum tube lifter is suspended in this instance from a jib arm, which pivots around the required working environment from a freestanding vertical column.
In operation, sacks or bags are loaded via a conveyor belt type infeed into the enclosed primary splitting chamber. The bags drop directly onto a heavy-duty screw auger via the vertical cutting blades. 99% of the contents immediately fall through the mesh screen into the downstream process via an angled outlet hopper. Once cut into hoops the, almost entirely emptied, bag passes into a tumble drum/screening chamber, which ensures 99.98% product discharge efficiency. Paddles fitted inside the tumble drum repeatedly lift up the empty hoop sections and any remaining product is efficiently separated. To retain a dust tight operating atmosphere, the machine includes an integral waste compactor, which is positioned at the end of the tumble drum process. Excellent access is provided to internal components for easy clean-down.
A review of the performance of the machines is that they have improved productivity and dramatically reduced downtime and expensive repairs to the injection moulding machines. With the original manually fed rip and tip stations, despite taking extreme precautions to ensure that knives or blades did not enter the system, incidents occurred resulting in costly damage to the injection moulding machines and lost production. Since the installation of the RotaSlit machines in late 2006 early 2007 Helesi have not had a single breakdown of the injection moulding machines due to knife or blade intrusion.
A further benefit for Helesi's production team has been the reduction in manpower required in the process as only one person is required to operate the vacuum tube lifter, RotaSlit and the injection moulding machine. Most importantly the operators are delighted with the operation of the materials handling equipment supplied by Palamatic, both in the UK and Greece plants. And Palamatic is now being considered as preferred supplier for implementation of the same type of system for new Italian facility.
