ounded in 1962, liquid filling sachet and tube packaging solutions provider, Unette, builds and operates bespoke machinery
wanted a simpler approach.”
for a form, fill and seal process which is said to be unique within the packaging industry. Covering all types of liquid filling including toiletries, nutraceuticals and medicines, its customers include global household brands, with its Cheshire plant having the capacity for 1.85 million dosing cycles per week. The group also has a facility in New Jersey, USA. Historically using cam-operated machines,
Unette began to combine motion control with servo and stepper motors to improve speed and accuracy. With its two-axis filling and printing machine, tubes are formed individually before cyclically filled with product. They are then die cut shaped, multi coded and any appendages attached. The camindexermoves the rotating carousel
that holds the tubes until the plate is in the correct position. At this stage, one servo axis controls the motion of the filling heads that dispense themedia, the other controlsmovement of the film for applying brand and product
information on the tubes. These two actions have to be synchronised to themain camandmust be coordinated at precisely the right time to ensure accuracy of filling and over printing. This process also has to be implemented at high speed in order to meet demanding productivity rates. The company had been using a PLC with a
servo package frommultiple vendors to achieve the motion control. However, to improve productivity, the accuracy of fill and print registration needed to be increased, as well as the speed of control. Accumulated errors also decreased reliability, and using different vendors for the various components within the system resulted in a lack of compatibility. “Allowing the PLC to coordinate the motion
created problems in accuracy and reliability. We wanted a stable approach with more productivity,” commented Martyn Hudson, founder and chief engineer at Unette. “Not only was the level of control not
achievable with a PLC, but we couldn’t get the PLC and the servo drives to talk to each other reliably at speed and neither vendor could resolve the issues,” he added. “We
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To meet the requirements, Trio installed a complete machine solution which included its highly compact Flex-6 Nano motion coordinator with dual core processor, combined with two Trio DX4 servo drives and Trio MX series servo motors. The Flex-6 Nano controls the entire process, including packaging and filling, from infeed to outfeed. Efficiency has increased through Trio’s
fully integrated motion control solution that has reduced downtime, improving productivity. Not only has machine speed increased by 8%, but daily efficiency of the machine has risen to 91% and Unette is confident that this figure can be further improved. Trio’s coordinator has not only enhanced
the machine’s motion control, but it can also command the required logic functions. “The Triomotion coordinator nowmanages
the areas of process control formerly taken care of by the PLC,” explained Hudson. “Thismeans that themotion coordinator can also control the
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