A new palletizing system at one Australian brewery adds a quiet, graceful do-si-do to the palletizing line, at the same time offering greater flexibility and savings in maintenance.

Foster's in Australia
Making the beer and getting it to millions of thirsty Aussies is a serious business. And a big one. Australia makes about 2 billion liters of beer a year, and the country consistently ranks in the top 10 of beer consumers in the world in terms of liters drunk per person.

One of the country’s largest breweries, and certainly its most modern, is the giant Foster’s plant at Yatala near the Gold Coast, Australia’s famed surfing and holiday mecca in the southeast corner of the state of Queensland.

The Yatala brewery can make about 540 million liters of beer a year, roughly 25 percent of the nation’s output, and some of Australia’s most recognized brands of beer are brewed and packaged there.

Cartons packed with bottles full of famous brews such as Victoria Bitter – Australia’s No. 1 selling beer – Crown Lager, Carlton Mid and Foster’s roll off the plant’s four “palletizer” lines at a mind-boggling rate, 24 hours a day, six days a week.

Palletizing application
It is in the palletizer area that you can easily see the contrast between the past and the future.The palletizer lines do what their name suggests: They stack the cartons of freshly bottled beer onto pallets, ready for warehousing and eventual distribution by trucks throughout the vast expanses of Queensland and its neighboring state, New South Wales.

The pallets typically hold 70 cartons (seven layers of 10 packs, each containing 24 375ml bottles), which need to be stacked precisely. Only the interlocking pattern of the stack and a small dab of glue on each box create the cohesion to keep everything in place for transport.

Creating that interlocking pattern at speed is a crucial part of what the palletizers do. Three of the palletizers are conventional, employing technology largely unchanged for decades. They use rollers, dividers and rotators to position cartons for their arrival onto the pallets into a pre-ordained pattern designed to maximize stack stability.

It is fast and effective, but if you want to change the pattern it can take two hours to reset the equipment. And there are many moving parts, which means a lot of noise, potential danger to workers and high maintenance costs.

The fourth palletizer is different.
Here two ABB IRB 4400 robots work quietly in tandem, one behind the other, to position the cartons of beer streaming towards them. Mounted above the conveyor belt they curtsy to each approaching box, looking like water birds dipping their beaks into the lake shallows.

Having sensed where their quarry sits, each machine will grab a carton and shove it into position according to the pattern their minders have asked them to build.

Realiable
Their minders – Kevan Morgan and Geoff Gould – couldn’t be happier. Gould is the brewery’s site services project manager, and Morgan is the electrical packaging/projects coordinator. Between them they commissioned and now supervise the roboticized palletizer.

When they look at their handiwork they see the future. “Conventional palletizing systems are a thing of the past,” says Gould. “They have been around forever, but their days are numbered. This robotic system will become the norm.

“The robots aren’t quicker, but they are much simpler and more predictable.” And reliable. Since installation in 2004, the robots, made by ABB, have been in operation for nearly 9,000 hours, stopping only for routine maintenance.

Customer with demads
When the robot system was trialed, Foster’s stipulated the criteria to Foodmach, the company that supplied the robot cell: reliability, flexibility, gentle product handling, low maintenance, low noise, unmanned operation and no time for extended commissioning.

They set a target of 99.5 percent compliance. What they got was 100 percent.

Morgan and Gould were impressed, and there were a few skeptics at Foster’s who were wary of the new technology who had to bite their tongues. “A lot can go wrong with conventional palletizers,” says Morgan, “But the reliability of the robots has caused us no problems. The advantage of not having to maintain high-speed line dividers and carton rotators is a substantial cost benefit.”

It is an intuitive system
Maintenance for the two robots costs 4,876 Australian dollars a year and requires about a day of downtime. Morgan says the other major benefit was that the Robomatrix software allowed an operator to trial different stacking patterns and instruct the robot accordingly.

“It is an intuitive system,” says Gould. “You can create a virtual stack, and Robomatrix will tell you if you can do it.” For Foodmach, a company that specializes in material movement systems for the food and beverage industries, getting Foster’s to sign up for Robomatrix was a coup.

“Getting Foster’s to embrace that technology was the main issue for us.” says Foodmach Queensland representative John Harris.

Having embraced it, Foster’s has been toasting its success ever since.

Benefits:

• The robotic pattern-forming system is flexible, allowing the introduction of new products and palletizing patterns without compromising the pattern-forming function used on existing products.

• It also allows simple, repeatable changeovers between products and patterns.

• The system realizes substantial savings on maintenance costs, due to the high reliability of the ABB robots.

• In the event of one robot faulting, the palletizer can continue production, albeit at a reduced rate, using the other robot.

• The system can handle cartons, shrink-wrapped trays or trays with no shrink film, as the packs are situated on the plastic modular pattern-forming belt in a precise position, with minimal clearance between accumulating packs.

• The end result is a layer of packs that require little final compression by layer squarers at the stripping zone.

Courtesy of  ABB