TPT July 2021

AR T I C L E

Fives Group

Case study: advanced robotic modular packaging solution for tubular products By Fives Group, France

The inlet buffer table is where the tubes are stored after being picked up from the runout table. It is made by multiple parallel chain units, each one built with ground supports assembled on a big, welded frame. Depending on the layout, a first series of indexing chain receives the tubes unloaded by the cut off rollway or picks up the tubes directly from the cut off rollway. For profiles, along the indexing chains, a sensor reads the tube orientation and when required it activates a pneumatic tilting device that rotates the tube, so that it can be conveyed onto the buffer area horizontally. An additional series of plastic covered steel chains take the tubes ahead towards the end of the table creating a tube buffer storage, which perfectly aligns in front of the robot, thanks to a series of product stoppers and a pneumatic pusher. Depending on the OD tubes range, a series of additional devices can be installed in order to avoid overlapping and excessive tube bending. The translation of the tubes from the inlet buffer table to the forming conveyor is taken care by an anthropomorphic

The tubular robotic modular packaging solution from Fives is at an advanced frontier of innovation, offering tube manufacturers an important set of core advantages. Fives sought to be a step ahead in the development of tube and pipe packaging technology by replacing traditional forks with anthropomorphic robots and applying a modular approach to the mechanical system design. Combining the advantages of the robotic technology and modular design, Fives achieved optimum flexibility in terms of plant design, upgrade and reuse with minimum engineering impact. Robotic systems prove to be highly standardised, off-the shelf from any brand, reliable and cost-effective solutions in many areas such as offering fast and safe installation, saving space, being low maintenance, offering increased throughput and also quicker changeovers. The solution perfectly fits with applications requiring particular care with material surface quality and meets the most stringent regulations related to safety and noise abatement. When dealing with tube packaging, tube makers must deal with plant and process dependent layouts. This is where the utmost flexibility is needed. While traditional packaging solutions, relying on forks, provide heavy, fixed-pace, rigid and noisy systems, Fives thought it was time to overcome the traditional fork-like systems’ limitations by bringing robotics into the finishing lines. Robopack is the latest robotic packaging system developed by Fives, dedicated to lateral applications for profiles and tubes that replaces the traditional forks with anthropomorphic robots to pick up the tubes, creating hexagonal or square/ rectangular bundles. Compared to the fork technology, the robots’ application, along with its Fives modular developed design, strongly increases flexibility and performance production, improves safety, speeds up the changeover, drastically reduces the maintenance costs and offers a set of other advantages from space saving to fast commissioning, noise abatement and quality preservation. The technology The Robopack system consists of modular units arranged, according to the customer needs, to realise a flexible packaging system capable of automatically handling round and derived tubes from 19mm OD at 3m length.

Figure 1: Overall view of the technology

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JULY 2021