AUTOMATED MANIPULATION TECHNIQUES FOR HIGH SPEED PACKAGING MACHINERY

Mohamad  J. TOUDMERY

The aim of this project is to improve the performance of the interface between the wrapping and cartooning machines. The bottleneck in this area is shown to be the transfer and collating of the products at the output of the flow wrapping machine and their subsequent feeding in rows or layers to the cartoons. Various existing and common diverting techniques are briefly reviewed. Three different alternative solutions for the existing diverting techniques are identified for further examination, namely," the air jet diverter ", " the right angle perforated suction belt" and" the screw diverter". The remainder of the thesis covers modeling and design of the air jet diverter and the perforated suction belt.

For the air jet diverter  technique, Schlichting's solution is used to predict the velocity profile of a free turbulent air jet out of a thin orifice. A simulation based on this solution is developed and used to calculate the impinging force on the sides of rectangular chocolate bars. The theory of the friction effect on a sliding object in a planar motion is reviewed. The area of contact between the pushed bar and its support is assumed to be continuous. Although this solution is the most realistic one, it may not give satisfactory results when the contact is uneven. Therefore, three points of contact are also assumed in order to establish the variations and boundary of the resulting motion. The dynamic equations of a rectangular bar rotating about an instantaneous center with sliding friction have been established for each case. The non‑linearity of these equations led to the use of the predictor‑corrector method to compute the instantaneous position and orientation of a rectangular bar impinged on by an air jet.

For the perforated suction belt technique, the theory governing the dynamic behavior of a prismatic bar falling freely from the end of a moving conveyor has been established. The resulting sets of ordinary differential equations are solved by using Runge‑Kutta‑Merson method. The section force applied through a circular hole on a circular disc mounted above the hole has been established theoretically and experimentally. Based on an experimental measurement, it has been shown that the applied suction force on a rectangular object can be calculated by replacing it by a circular disc having a diameter equal to the width of the object. The time window available to perform the diversion on the perforated suction belt is established A computer program to predict the dynamics of the diverted bars over the suction belt is developed and used to optimize various operating parameters.

Experiments have also been carried out to verify the theoretical work mentioned above. The conclusions and suggestions for further work are noted at the end of the thesis.