Tight integration automates labeling operation

摘要

Innoventor Solutions Inc., St. Louis, MO, is a producer of custom designs and hardware for plant modernization, process improvement, critical process control, testing and verification, and specialty equipment. The company recently used National Instruments' PXI plat-form as its programmable automation controller (PAC) to create a packaging automation system for the beverage industry. The client previously installed labels on beverage cans by land and sorted them manually. This process created a production bottleneck and increased the risk of motion injuries for employees. Further complicating development of a suitable automation solution was the client's requirement that the per-piece average cycle time for the new system had to be 1.4 seconds. Since the labels on the cans have mbre than 150 possible color schemes and background patterns, an additional challenge was finding and reading the bar code on each can.