A cap with a film sealed foldable spoon is now a very popular packaging solution for Yogurt and Ice cream for it's convenience and high standard of hygiene and the convenience for consumers. And a chains packed foldable spoons are friendly to the automation system for the injection molding of caps for the Yogurt cups of other dairy products with or without IML. SWITEK spoon folding and film packing automation system with vision control is an automation system designed for the unman production of the foldable spoons automatically.

The Functional Unit of the Foldable Spoons Auto-Production System

• Details of the Foldable Spoon:
  • Material: PP
  • Weight: 1.2g
  • Cavities: 2 x 16
  • Injection Cycle: 10s
  • Daily Output: >270,000pcs
  • Injection Molding Machine: 360T
• Picking Robot:

  The picking robot here is the SWITEK 3 axis servo robotic arm SW6712DS which has a payload up to 8kg to handle the picking of the foldable spoons from the injection molding machine and pass through the first camera to check the quality of the front side of the spoons and have them placed on the folding station of the automation syste.

• Vision Control System:

  There're 3 vision control unit here in the automation system:

  1. In front the spoon folding station to check the front side of the spoons before they're placed on the folding station.
  2. Above the spoon folding station to check the back side of the spoons before they're folded.
  3. After the film sealing system to check the quality of the film lamerating.

  The quality of the spoons would be guananteed with the 3 steps of vision checking for the strick quality standard of the dairy products producers.

• The Spoon Folding Unit:

  The function unit here is to fold the good spoons and reject the spoons with injection defects.

• Supplementary Unit:

  There're a gantry robot in the supplementary unit to pick a good spoon from the spare station to supplement the rejected spoons to ensure that no empty bags produced in the chain spoons.

• Spoons Packing Unit:

  The quality spoons would be film laminated as a chain of 10,000pcs/pcs and pass through the 3^rd vision control unit for the final quality checking.

The High Lights of the Automation System

The high lights of the foldable spoons auto-packing system with vision control is that it will enable the spoons to be unman produced from the spoon picking, quality checking (Insufficient injection, flash, black dots etc.) to film laminating to meet the food safety standard. And the automation system will help to increase the productivity of the injection molding system, reduce the waste of the material and the cost of man hours.

Optional Solutions to Reduce the Cost of the Automation System

The supplementary unit in this automation system is a very complex one and is costy. The optional solution of this unit is to remove it and drop all the spoons of the same mold if one defect spoons detected. But this solution will increase the cost of recycling the rejected spoons.