Fast filling
Filling convenience meals and gourmet salads
In the fast-moving world
of speciality salads and convenience meals, the machines
built by Robot Food Tech ensure that the results taste good. These machines fill,
seal and pack culinary specialities into various containers. Festo automation in the
form of servopneumatic components, sensors and process drives, sets the pace.
W
hat requires hours with other
filling and packaging lines
during format changes, takes
us just a few minutes”,
declares Harald Grüne, Managing Director
of Robot Food Tech. Grüne is speaking
of the set-up times to change the filling
modules over to work with different sizes.
It is due in no small measure to these
short changeover times that this machine
builder is regarded as among the world’s
leaders in speciality food processing.
With pride, the company promotes the
slogan “Liedership in Packaging”,
reflecting the fact that Robot Food Tech
has for years sold and serviced traditional
filling and packaging systems worldwide
under the “Lieder” brand name.
Serving with high positioning accuracy
The best example of the high speed
delivered by Robot Food Tech from its
factory in northern Germany is the RCF
robotic filling machine. This achieves
output rates of up to 800 fillings per
minute. For the RCF filling machine, it is
an easy task to fill products such as
salads, jams, butter, or sauerkraut to
precise weight specifications.
The containers are hermetically sealed
after filling. This is the only way the
quoted “Best before” date can be
achieved. A gasification station feeds
nitrogen through ducts to the filled
containers. This reduces the residual
oxygen to a safe 0.1% of the original
volume. The nitrogen supply is regulated
by a DLP, a pneumatic linear drive for
process automation applications, while
pressure sensors control the correct
pressure for the nitrogen. The welding of
sealing film is the last step in the filling
and packaging process.
Servopneumatic portioning
Servopneumatics is responsible for the
precision of the filling operation. A Festo
controller CMAX is used here for the fine
regulation of the position and force of
the pneumatic drives. “Thanks to this
technology, our systems are able to
The RCF robotic filling
machine is
distinguished by its
short set-up times.