Aerosol filling and closing equipment manufacturer, Oystar Aerofill produces three families of products for use on index lines – two being pneumatically driven, the other using electrical servos – together with a family of fully-automated high speed rotary filling and closing machines for use on continuous production lines.
Although index lines tend to have a relatively low throughput – the fastest machine that Oystar Aerofill produces is the Flexi Pak, which can handle up to 160 cans per minute. For continuous high speed operation, Oystar’s latest generation Rotary Pak family of continuous motion aerosol filling and closing machines can handle throughput rates as high as 500 cans per minute.
Although every Oystar machine is built to customer specification, many of their basic functions are broadly similar. The working heads are modular, so the machines can be readily modified to accommodate different production needs. Each head comprises a manifold with control valves for the pneumatic actuators, plus all associated components, and until recently, these were manufactured in-house – a costly, skills-based and time-consuming business.
The company approached Festo, to investigate whether standard pre-built manifolds might provide a technically viable and more cost-effective alternative. The application proved an obvious candidate for Festo’s integrated pneumatic duct plate technology, which uses a multi-layer polymer manifold block, with fully integrated pneumatic logic, to provide a standardised module. The approach guarantees the repeatability of each machine head, which was previously very difficult to achieve.
So far, Festo has developed three different modules that can be combined in a variety of ways to cover a wide range of applications, and which enable individual features to be included, or omitted, without the need for a complete redesign. This type of integration technology also helps to minimise both the physical size of the modules and the number of interfaces that are needed, simplifying installation and maintenance.
The modules are, in fact 100% interchangeable with the previous in-house built versions, and require much less tubing. Indeed, the few pneumatic connections that have to be made use simple push-fit connectors. Although Festo’s manifold is slightly costlier than Oystar’s previous in-house approach, the purchasing process is much simpler, and the company can now order a complete ATEX-compliant control module under a single part number. However, the largest gain is undoubtedly in build time reduction. By switching to this modular, fully-integrated form of pneumatic valve block, Oystar estimates that it can reduce the average build time of systems by 30%.