Jacob’s makes cracking savings
2 August 2010 – Jacob’s Biscuits in Liverpool, UK has recently installed Turbo tray denesters on three of its savoury biscuit lines.
The denesters are of the Pneufeed air jet type, which denest the trays by means of a venturi principle and were chosen for reliability of denesting and speed of size change.
The denesters have been set up to supply 200g, 300g and 500g trays at speeds of between 34 to 40 trays per minute. The speeds for each tray size are pre-set and selected by rotary switch to allow precise control of the line speed. The trays are denested onto a plain belt conveyor and are then loaded manually by operators. If there is a line stop downstream for any reason the denester has a queue sensor on the outfeed which will automatically stop and start the denester.
When size changing, the 200g and 300g trays can be substituted for each other without any changes as they have the same length and width dimensions. Although these trays have different internal cavity layouts and depth, the air jet system can accommodate this without change as there are no suckers or parts needed to pick the tray.
On the question of health and safety a gas strut was fitted to the front flap guard to prevent accidental closure and an additional sensor was fitted to prevent the denester cycling with an empty magazine, thus eliminating any possibility of access through the front guard aperture.
Jacob’s also needed their machines to be freely interchangeable between each of the 3 lines. This involved development of an outfeed chute with offset delivery, to accommodate an area of restricted width on one side of each line, and fitment of castors for easy mobility.
