December’s machine of the month features 3 ALbelt systems built for Molecular Products, market leaders in chemical technology for the purification of air. Two of the solutions are standard configurations of the ALbelt C and ALbelt E, and the third is a special system designed to label the front of a shaped container.
ALbelt machines were chosen due to the relative simplicity of the various applications, low speed production rates of the semi automatic lines and cost sensitive nature of the customers budget.
The ALbelt C is positioned at the start of a production line, fed via a rotary carousel table (supplied by the customer) and used to apply a transparent ¾ wraparound label to 140mm diameter, slightly tapered, clear cylindrical pots (cartridges). The machine includes a simple spacing wheel and upstream line build back sensor to synchronise with an indexing filling and sealing system further along the line. The solution also features an ALstep S (100mm max label height) labelling head, ultrasonic label sensor and direct wraparound unit.
The ALbelt E machine is positioned at the end of a second production line, fed directly from the customers indexing rotary carousel filling system, applying a front and back label to straight sided 5ltr jerry cans. This solution features two opposite hand ALstep M (200mm max label height) labelling heads with individual LCD control units.
The ALbelt Special machine is used to label the front of a shaped jar and also features an ALstep M labelling head, but here fitted with a rotary arm, swing and blow label application system. This works in combination with two synchronised side belts to space, transfer and perfectly pitch products to the labelling head. This allows time to position the arm across the line, blowing the label onto the front face of the product and retracting before collecting the next label and repeating the cycle.
These 3 solutions demonstrate the modular design flexibility of the ALbelt platform and highlight the robust quality of our lower cost machine solutions which are ideal for slower semi-automatic fed lines and limited customer budgets.
