Syntegon unveils latest continuous slide system for biscuits and cookies
German-based equipment and systems company Syntegon has unveiled a key flexible equipment line in the form of its Distribution Continuous Slide (DCS), a new highly flexible discharge station for round cookies, crackers and biscuits, writes Neill Barston.
Developed in modular form, it consists of one or more stations arranged one behind the other, featuring belt slides for particularly gentle handling, that has been devised to minimise mechanical stress and thus reducing product breakage and loss.
Another core design principle has been a target of ami optimum pack style flexibility, the Syntegon DCS distributes cookies onto belt legs for packing them flat or on-edge into pile, slug or tray packs. Furthermore, the system’s guard-free design provides operators with unrestricted process visibility, safe accessibility and easy cleaning.
According to the company, cookies, biscuits and crackers are taken from the cooling conveyor and are continuously distributed to the system’s leg belts, sliding over them in order to protect them from mechanical stress. This design feature reportedly reduces product loss significantly and leads to efficiency gains, especially when handling particularly sensitive products.
Furthermore, the higher the speed of the belt slide, the more cookies are transfered to downstream leg belts by the DCS. On the individual legs, a further belt slide, arranges the straight product stream into an S-shape. This arrangement ensures the cookies’ and crackers’ are evenly distributed across the entire width of the belt, preventing them from wedging or overlapping. A homogeneous product stream is created, ensuring a constant feed to the packaging machine.
Thanks to its gentle handling, the Syntegon DCS works particularly efficiently and ensures high output and product quality. The system is equipped to handle even briefly fluctuating production volumes intelligently, triggered for example by the failure of a packaging leg.
“Individual discharge stations can run at full speed to avoid production loss”, explains Daniel Bossel, Global Product Manager at Syntegon. “If the product build up on a leg belt becomes too long, the DCS automatically discharges fewer products onto that leg. At the same time, it distributes the surplus to the next stations, automatically increasing their discharge capacity. All legs can continue to operate constantly – until the product storage is empty. In this way, the DCS enables maximum storage times with minimum storage lengths – a significant efficiency advantage.”
