Smart Divider Maintains Speed with Trajexia Motion Controller

In material handling operations, lane dividers are a great time saver. Empty bottles headed into a filling operation, for example, can be divided into two packaging lines to feed two fillers, cutting production time virtually in half. The same applies to labeling operations or any other operation on a line where input speed exceeds operational speed. That advantage has made dividers very popular. However, they often have one problem, and it's a big one. Most dividers in service today are mechanically driven, and deliver single bottles alternately to one output line, then to another. If one line that the divider is feeding goes down, both lines usually have to shut down because the divider cannot quickly adjust to send all incoming bottles to the remaining active line.

Until now, that is. Kinsley, Inc. (www.kinsleyinc.com), working with specialists from Omron Electronics, LLC (www.omron247.com), has developed a lane divider driven by Omron servo motors and controlled by Omron's sophisticated Trajexia controller. “When we learned about this new application that Kinsley was developing,” says Steve Windham, Omron's vertical market manager for food and beverage packaging, “we knew immediately that it would benefit from the simple, agile motion control delivered by Trajexia.” Kinsley, Inc. is a leading manufacturer of timing screws and drives, combiners and dividers, cap feeders and tighteners and other precise, value-adding packaging equipment. The new equipment is called the Kinsley Smart Servo Divider System, and the Trajexia controller can activate the servo motors to instantly shift the divider's entire throughput into one of the lines it feeds, when a problem shuts down the other. Even though total production may then be reduced by 30 to 50 percent, complete shutdown is avoided, and production output continues until the second line is brought back online.