Retrofit – via a picker cell

Dr. Schär Deutschland GmbH increased production performance by integrating a new picker cell into a plant that had existed for twenty years.

Dr. Schär Deutschland GmbH is considered to be one of the leading food specialist for specific dietary nutritional needs. The company recently commissioned ASA GmbH, Mainhausen, G ermany, to design and build a picker cell to pack gluten-free foods that could be integrated with process safety into a plant that had existed for twenty years, since even production plants that have existed for decades often still possess technologies that function very well. Having said this, many plants no longer or only partly fulfill today’s requirements for product quality and quantity coupled with higher performance. In addition to cost savings, producers want increasingly resource-aware and environmentally conscious thinking. ASA offers retrofit concepts for existing production lines to meet these requirements. The process involves replacing only critical modules or supplemented them with new requirements.

Cell replacement

In a Dr. Schär production plant consisting of a total of five modules, only one module was replaced by a new one. In this way the retrofit design offers mechanical and electrical interfaces to allow the new production cell to be integrated into and replace sections of the existing plant, thus increasing production capacity and securing product quality.

In detail, the focus was placed on the core task when developing this design concept: picking up products from a moving belt “on the fly”, sorting them and depositing them into blister packs. None of the existing plant’s processes already present in the surroundings were touched. A standard ASA cell fitted with a Delta picker and vision system for product position detection and with a welded steel base-frame construction served as the basis for the remainder of the cell assembly. Complex product grippers fabricated by a 3-D injection method and fitted with a quick-change gripper system meet the needs of the design concept for multiple product variants.

The structural design of the base-frame was such that it fits into the existing space conditions, thus leaving the entire existing container logistics (product packaging) untouched. The company explained that the connection to the existing control technology was implemented in such a way that operation of the production plant remained unchanged. This guaranteed that production startup was completed in a short time. +++