Customer Solutions: Case Conveyor

The boxes are filled manually and then accumulated along the initial 190-ACC line. They are released once the pallets have completed their run.

Celanese Mexicana, a producer of raw material for the textile industry, is located in Jalisco, Mexico. For many years, their packaging and distribution within their facility was done manually. Packages were manually transferred from one station to another before finally being hand sorted to one of ten different pallets for final distribution.

Conveyors & Automation System’s office in Guadalajara worked together with Celanese to develop a material handling system to improve their throughput and increase their output capabilities. The initial concept and design was to handle two basic products: boxes and pallets. They began with designing a main line assembly area where the raw products are manually placed within individual boxes. Following the boxes being filled, they are then loaded upon the Hytrol model 190-ACC to travel to its next destination. The boxes are then accumulated along this initial line until released to continue their run. Following the initial packing line, Celanese is now able to perform two major packing operations on the following portion of the system.

There are four workstations located strategically along the two lines of model 2511-CREZ that mirror each other in performance and function. The workstations here allow for the Celanese employees to hand load special run textile orders into special pallets designed for the textile spindles. The workers will fill a pallet and let them accumulate via the chain roller zero-pressure conveyor (2511-CREZ) and the pneumatically operated stops at the end of the lines before they are transferred off to lift tables. The perpendicular lift tables will then hold them until a fork truck operator will pick the pallet up and take them to the shipping department. The second function of the 2511-CREZ line is to allow for transport of the boxes that were packaged in the initial 190-ACC lines at the beginning of the system. Once the pallet-packing operators have completed their run, they will release the 190-ACC line to continue to the 2511-CREZ line where it will accumulate awaiting the taping machine at the end of this run.

After passing through the taping station, the boxes are then staged, via the model 190-ABEZ zero pressure accumulator, to await pick-up from one of two robots.
The robots read the bar codes placed on the boxes to position them on pallets classified, according to their final destination. Each pallet is arranged through a series of model DC-60 drag chain accumulating conveyors with roller transfers located strategically within the overall length of the conveyor. Once a pallet is filled, staged and positioned, it is then carried via a transfer cart to a final line of model 2511-CREZ pallet accumulation conveyor where they will then be shrink wrapped and loaded on to awaiting trucks.

Through the implementation of this new system, Celanese now has product throughput of up to 50 boxes per minute, per line with their product-loss rate percent at 0%!