Whitepaper: Indexing for Speed

200 milliseconds, one fifth of a second, doesn’t sound like much. It might be costing you hundreds of thousands of bottles a year that you could otherwise sell.

Have I got your attention?

An 8-head inline filler, running 8 cycles per minute, has a cycle time of 7.5 seconds. During an 8-hour shift, it will cycle 3,840 times to produce almost 31,000 products. Over a year, 250 shifts, it will produce about 7.75 million bottles.

If 200 milliseconds are added to the cycle time, production drops to 3,696 cycles per shift. Annual output drops to 7.4 million bottles.

200 extra milliseconds cost 350,000 bottles of product that could have been sold for money.

Still think 200ms is no biggie?

Indexing bottles in and out of an inline filler is pretty straightforward. Doing it right, to maximize throughput, requires attention to detail. I often find fillers that because of improper setup or by design are not producing as they should. As with any packaging machine, understanding how it works is the first step to understanding how to make it work better. This paper will explain various indexing architectures.

The most common indexing systems bring the bottles in a single lane to the filler nozzles. Two air cylinders are used to extend fingers across the conveyor to stop the bottles. The upstream, inlet, finger is called the index gate. The downstream, discharge, finger is the fill gate. The purpose of the fill gate is to position the bottles under the filling nozzles. The purpose of the index gate is to hold the empty bottles back while the filled bottles leave the filling area.

Download the complete Indexing for Speed Whitepaper to continue learning about indexing.