Corrugated carton glue line effective control scheme

Applying too much or too little glue to a corrugated cardboard box will cause the cartboard manufacturer to receive a return shipment full of semi-trailers. In addition to dealing with tough customers, carton manufacturers have to “eat” scrapped products, not only that, but also pay related fines and overtime paid for the return of cartons. Each production line costs more than half a million dollars each year due to waste products.

The yellow arrow shows the light from the light source to the probe point to the wiring diagram of the two SmartImage sensors on the upper and lower sides of the DVT600 series. Smofad Control Systems' glue monitor also measures the size of the carton, provides alarms, and can be operated remotely using the Internet.

Corrugated box production machines require that the glue line at the edge of the adhesive cartons is effectively set. In the machine, rectangular cardboard is fed into a punch knife, cutting out the shape of the carton. The cut paperboard is moved along the conveyor belt. At this time, glue is applied to a limited area on one side of the paperboard. While continuing to move along the conveyor belt, the outer cardboard is gradually folded upwards, and the cardboard on one side is pressed against the cardboard on the other side, with the glue strip in between. The flattened cartons were finally parked on top of a stack of shelves in preparation for being bundled and shipped to customers.

Control point

The key control points of the glue line include: starting point and stopping point, the alignment of the carton can avoid the “out of edge” of the glue line and the instability of glue amount. Belt speeds reaching or exceeding 8 meters per second produce vibration, glue wetting, dust, and flying corrugated debris.

At the beginning of the operation, an operator checks the position of the first carton and the quality of the glue bar while the machine is idle. When running at full speed, it is impossible to see glue sticks because the safety cage isolates people from safety distances.

Excessive glue can cause more than one carton to be picked up at once. The glue is not in the correct position, and may inadvertently stick to the inner layer of the carton, making the carton impossible to form. Too little glue can cause a filled cartons or shelves to spread out.

In the past, the carton industry has made many efforts to improve glue positioning, including the use of discrete sensors (laser or capacitive technology) to detect the location of each of the three glue bars. The problem is that tiny glue sticks are difficult to sense with any principle. When the adhesive strip goes out of bounds, the discrete sensor sees that the missing glue stick triggers a fault alarm, which can be solved by actually moving it slightly.

Recently, the camera-based system has significantly improved its price/performance ratio. It can detect the size of the carton and ensure that the glue is correctly applied in the correct position.

Smofad Control Systems is a technical service provider for Amcor Corp, a large packaging company. Both companies are located in Melbourne, Australia. After trying to use discrete sensors to improve the accuracy of glue sticks, Murray Dicker, director of Smofad, field-tested the visual sensors of DVT Corp. in Georgia, USA. Amcor allows the installation of a test system in Auckland, New Zealand. The test was done on the weekend, so it did not affect production.



A vision system including a camera and a fast PLC is connected with a photosensor, a spool encoder, and a human-machine interaction panel equipped with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) software. The system automatically recognizes the type, size, and glue bar position of the box and displays the information on the screen for the operator to verify.

The first goal was to detect the defective product. For this purpose, a mechanical device like a bomb door was designed to automatically remove the defective box. Dicker further realized that the root cause of the defective product should be solved instead of just removing the defective product on the production line. In addition, he has to overcome some operators' prejudice against the previous vision system: they are accustomed to turning off the camera detection system with a bypass switch. To prevent the same thing from happening, a 100baseT Ethernet TCP/IP was plugged into Amcor's local area network (WAN) so that Dicker could manage the production line over the Internet.

Through remote detection, Dicker proposes to use an application device to improve quality. Once, he noticed that a scrap of paper stuck to the glue gun affected the operation. On the other hand, dry glue accumulates like a stalactite down from the glue gun periodically, but must be removed before they rub to the tail of the carton or block the flow of work. From this, Dicker verified that the camera could find out why each time there was a defective product. In the event of a problem, the system will automatically alarm on the screen and issue alarms while stopping the pipeline in order to solve the problem and remove substandard products.

(to be continued)

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