Food & Drink Process & Packaging Issue 28 2020 | Page 9

Just like the other products that Confiserie Bosch makes, including chocolates, sweets, praline eggs and chocolate-coated fruit, Wibele are extremely fragile and so present a real challenge for a fully automated weighing and packing process. The solution not only needed to be fast and operate with close to zero product giveaway, but also handle the fragile product with extreme care. According to Wolfgang Hellstern, “Before we made our investment decision, we watched Ishida weighers in action during visits to other production facilities, which gave us some idea of the technology involved.” The 14-head CCW-RV-GS multihead weigher for fragile products selected by Confiserie Bosch features gently sloping hoppers with minimum transfer distances and shallow angle discharge chutes with minimal drop heights, to ensure that the products are handled with the utmost care. Both the hoppers and the discharge chutes are also fitted with removable synthetic liners for extra cushioning and a ring shutter underneath the discharge chute further reduces drop distances, minimises product collisions and optimises the product transfer to the packaging machine. The weigher is fed via a belt elevator and conveyor. A belt elevator and feeder then transfer the biscuits via the weigher’s dispersion feeder table and the 14 radial feeder troughs to a set of special curved pool and weigh hoppers with double opening doors. The system’s software takes just a fraction of a second to calculate the three best combinations, checks them again and selects the combination of weigh hoppers that come closest to the target weight. The unique anti-floor-vibration Confiserie Bosch is now using its Ishida the “incredibly gentle handling of the weighing and filling system to pack weigher”, without which automation half of its range, amounting to around would not have been possible. Wolfgang 80 products. The system switches Hellstern states that Confiserie Bosch between products several times a day can now manufacture its products with which can be done seamlessly using much more flexibility and is able to different pre-sets that can be called up accept orders that previously had to be on the multihead weigher’s touch screen turned down. display. Because the CCW-RV-GS model The bags have fill weights of between supports Industry 4.0 technology, the 40g and 200gwith the weigher running Ishida multihead weigher has also at speeds of 60 weighments per minute given Confiserie Bosch further potential and an impressive accuracy variance of for optimising its processes. For only 0.1g per pack. In comparison, an performance monitoring purposes, the employee could just about manage two web-based Sentinel software allows the packs per minute with the old manual weigher to be connected to the Ishida packing process, and with a much lower service team’s system, where production accuracy and consistency. data can be recorded and evaluated in real time. Daily reports can then be system protects the load cell of the weigh hoppers from external vibrations As Wolfgang Hellstern points out: “This generated showing trends, batch sizes emanating from the production enormous improvement in performance and other statistics. Any machine faults environment. The precisely weighed cuts costs considerably and means or drops in performance can be identified portions are then released directly from that our investment is paying for itself early and often fixed remotely. the timing hopper into a bagmaker very quickly.” Nevertheless, the factor underneath. that has really made the difference is www.ishidaeurope.com FDPP - www.fdpp.co.uk 9