This system is the first of its kind to open and empty flexible plastic trays filled with syringe cartridges at the infeed of a downstream machine.
Automated inspection system for the pharmaceutical industry
Rising costs and more stringent regulations are placing increasing pressure on many sectors, and the pharmaceutical industry is no exception. This has resulted in a sharp increase in demand for automation solutions. mk and Automations Robotic have responded to this trend with a new fully automated inspection system for syringe cartridges containing liquid medicines.
Like many other sectors of industry, the pharmaceutical industry is being faced with rising costs for energy and raw materials, as well as stricter regulations, says Andreas Klihm, Technical Sales at mk in Troisdorf: “To cope with the higher prices, more and more companies are trying to offset some of the additional costs through increased automation in production. mk develops suitable solutions together with system integrators around the world.” One such project is an automation solution for the quality control of syringe cartridges containing liquid medicines, which mk has realised together with Automations Robotic GmbH, based in Massing in Bavaria. “This system is the first of its kind to open and empty flexible plastic trays filled with syringe cartridges at the infeed of a downstream machine”, says Andreas Schäffler, Sales at Automations Robotic. “At the outlet, the trays are then refilled and sealed – at an impressive speed of 600 cartridges per minute.”
The fully automated inspection line works as follows: The line starts with aluminium Euro pallets loaded with plastic trays, each of which contains 330 syringe cartridges. A pallet truck or, optionally, an automated guided vehicle system (AGVS) places the pallets on a three-line ZRF-P 2040 timing belt conveyor from mk. This conveyor has three parallel, 110 mm wide timing belts that can be loaded stably and evenly with a weight of up to 600 kg.
“Even though the conveyor itself does not have any contact with the cartridges and transports only the secondary packaging, we have attached great importance to the hygienic design of the system”, explains Klihm. The engineers have therefore used FDA-compliant timing belts and wear strips made from polyoxymethylene (POM), anodised aluminium parts and connecting elements, and all steel parts are made of stainless steel. In addition, the drives are mounted below or to the side of the conveyors to prevent particles from falling onto the trays.
Classic conveyor technology works together with modern robots
The three-line timing belt conveyor transports the Euro pallets to a depalletising station. Klihm explains that the starting position of the trays no longer has to be as precisely defined as before. “Thanks to sophisticated vision systems, modern robots are now even able to recognise objects that are arranged chaotically in containers and remove them precisely. This means it is no longer necessary for the conveyor technology to work with millimetre precision during positioning, making things much easier from a technical point of view and saving costs.” In the depalletising area, a robot removes the individual trays using a suction gripper and places them in the first processing station. Here the tray label is automatically cut and the lid is removed. A second robot takes the opened tray with its gripper and transports it to the downstream inspection machine, where it empties the tray. The cartridges are pushed in bulk onto the infeed conveyor of the inspection machine. In the inspection system, the syringe cartridges are automatically checked for leak tightness, material defects and particulate contamination.
The system’s next task is to transport the empty trays to the end of the inspection system and refill them with the cartridges. To save space for industrial trucks on the floor, the engineers opted for a double-line conveying path that is suspended at a height of 2.6 m from the ceiling. It is around 14 metres long and runs parallel to the inspection machine. It works as follows: A robot with double gripper transfers the lid and base of the tray to one of two lift systems with GUF-P 2000 belt conveyor. Once at the higher level, the tray components are again transported on ZRF-P 2045 timing belt conveyors. At the end of the line, they are taken to a workbench by two further lifts, where they are once again picked up by a robot and fed to the next works steps – filling the trays with inspected cartridges and sealing them with a lid. The lift transports any surplus trays for cartridges that have been rejected due to quality issues into a slide that leads to a reject container via a pneumatically liftable end stop.
Next, the trays are labelled. For this step, the packaging moves along a further conveying path, around ten metres long, under the ceiling to a centring unit specially manufactured by mk. This pneumatically liftable unit lifts the packaging through a mask that fixes the sides and lid. The sealing labels are then affixed and the barcode verified by a vision system. At another station, a check is performed to make sure that the seal is correctly applied and the tray is properly closed. The tray then continues its journey via the ZRF-P 2045. A corner transmission takes it to a manual product removal station, while defective packaging is forwarded to a reject line.
