Weighing, inspection and packing line solutions provider Ishida Europe has introduced a new multihead weigher, which is designed for gentle handling of the fragile stick snack products to minimize the potential for breakages.
Image: Ishida Europe’s weigher incorporates several features that are claimed to offer the highest levels of speed and accuracy. Photo: courtesy of Ishida Europe.
Ishida Europe said the CCW-RV-216W-1S-20-SS-STK1 is a standard model designed to handle the specific challenges of stick snack products at high speeds – up to 120 packs per minute – without the loss of accuracy or product quality.
The company’s new weigher incorporates several features that are claimed to offer the highest levels of speed and accuracy.
It will ensure optimum flow of the sticks, with decreased angles throughout, a low-profile inlet chute, convex dispersion table, and waterfall ends for smoother conversion of the long products into the pool hoppers.
Special electrostatic polished contact parts are claimed to trim down dust build up throughout the weighing process.
The weigher’s special hopper inserts allow maximum flexibility in handling several pack sizes, from 35g to 250g.
Every batch of sticks used in the combination is held in a special shutter hopper mid-way down the discharge chute after initial weighing. It will make sure that the products are correctly aligned, ready for discharge into the bag.
The accurate combination of product will then be transferred through a high-speed discharge chute which also features an inner guide insert to maintain alignment down to the next section.
The sticks pass through a pneumatically-driven triple Iris type timing hopper to reach the pack. The hopper settles the product as it passes via each stage of the iris.
In the second stage, the product is passed through an oscillating devise. A cutting device is used at the third stage to remove the top of any remaining misaligned sticks.
Ishida Europe said any last sticks cut then stay on the top of the bundle to make sure the right target weight is not compromised in the final pack.
The stick weigher is especially suitable to pack product into bags, including pillow and block bottom varieties. It has also been combined with other downstream equipment, such as for discharge into trays.
Available as a stand-alone weigher, the machine can also be supplied with an Ishida snacks bagmaker for a fully-integrated solution.