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BlueSword Shaped Cigarette Sorting Line R&D Chronology
Oriental Tobacco News Reporter: Yang Hongguang
In recent years, with cigarette consumption becoming more and more personalized and differentiated, the sales of shaped cigarettes have increased rapidly and taken up a higher and higher market share. However, the low degree of automation and long time spent in sorting shaped cigarettes have become the bottleneck that restricts the development of cigarette logistics.
Over the years, Shandong BlueSword Logistics Technology Co., Ltd. has adhered to the product development concept of "innovation from demand, research and development to serve the market", paid attention to the pain points of shaped cigarette sorting, and successfully developed a number of shaped cigarette sorting lines.
Good sorting
The difficulty in sorting shaped cigarettes lies in the word "shaped": due to the large differences in the shape and size of shaped cigarette packages, higher requirements are placed on the sorting equipment, and only by designing more reasonable cache bins and dialing mechanisms can the sorting equipment be better adapted to the different shapes of cigarettes.
For this reason, the design team of BlueSword Logistics conducted a comprehensive research on more than 100 kinds of shaped cigarette sizes on sale in the market, classified them into three major categories, and adopted three models to solve the sorting problem of more than 100 kinds of shaped cigarettes.
"These three models are horizontal machine, cabinet machine and vertical access machine." Shen Changpeng, assistant to the president of BlueSword Logistics Company, said.
The horizontal machine is a major innovation of BlueSword Logistics Company, which is used to sort shaped strips of cigarettes that approximate the size of standard cigarettes, and is also equipped with an automatic strips replenishment trolley, which can greatly improve the comprehensive sorting efficiency of the shaped cigarette sorting line and ensure that the system efficiency is no less than 5,000 cigarettes/hour. The cabinet machine is an upgraded version of the traditional A-frame machine, which is used to sort small and medium sized shaped cigarettes similar to the normal strip cigarettes.
The vertical channel machine is the most flexible sorting single machine, which can be used to sort cigarettes with irregular sizes, such as square, extra-long and wooden packages. BlueSword Logistics has specially designed butterfly bolts and plum nuts, which can freely adjust the sorting aisle size according to the size of shaped cigarettes.
In the application process, BlueSword Logistics makes different combinations of the three models according to the customer's needs.
On the premise of comparable sorting efficiency and automation level, whoever has a lower sorting line breakage rate will win the favor of the market.
BlueSword Logistics has innovatively adopted flexible pushing and gravity-based sliding in the sorting process to avoid scratching of the outer wrapper of cigarettes and edge folding caused by ejection and impact of the outgoing cigarettes, effectively reducing the rate of cigarette folding.
"The way we designed the smoke out transmission is not crossroads type, but like a car merging into the main road from the ramp, it belongs to the merging transmission." Shen Changpeng said that the direction of the convergence of the smoke and belt transmission direction, can minimize the distance between the smoke, to avoid unnecessary scraping caused by the direction of the smoke and transmission belt vertical.
Good package
Shaped cigarette sorting line without efficiency matching the packaging machine, the overall efficiency of the system and the degree of automation will be greatly restricted.
"The difficulty of packaging is not in wrapping, boxing, bagging, but in how to stack shaped cigarettes." Shen Changpeng said, "shaped cigarettes, some thick, some thin, extremely irregular shape, the packaging machine only first palletized, in order to pack cigarettes."
Shaped cigarettes have been unable to achieve automatic packaging mainly by the size difference, can not be regular palletizing restrictions, and shaped cigarette orders with a variety of varieties, the number of small characteristics, if the standard cigarette packaging machine stacking, packaging, it will cause a considerable waste of plastic film.
In view of this, BlueSword Logistics developed an automatic packer for shaped cigarettes in the packaging strategy of each order is divided into two categories, the opening of two "channels" to control which "channel" is a program-controlled slope.
BlueSword Logistics selects the palletizing method according to the order structure. When the order is for less than 5 cigarettes, the cigarettes enter the lower "channel" and can be automatically adjusted during the transmission process, effectively saving the amount of wrapping film used; when the order is for more than 5 cigarettes, the cigarettes enter the upper "channel" and the packer can preset the palletizing type in advance through the system. When the order is for more than 5 cigarettes, the packer can preset the pallets in advance through the system.
Since the launch of the shaped cigarette sorting line, BlueSword Logistics has signed contracts with more than 10 local and municipal bureaus (companies), including Qingdao City Tobacco Monopoly Bureau (Company) in Shandong Province and Jilin City Tobacco Monopoly Bureau (Company) in Jilin Province, and has finalized the implementation plan. Among them, the efficiency of the sorting line of Qingdao Municipal Bureau (Company) is stabilized at 4,800 to 5,000 pieces/hour, which is 40% more efficient than the original manual sorting line, greatly reducing the labor intensity and sorting error rate, and effectively improving the management level of shaped cigarette sorting.
"The most important feature of our shaped cigarette sorting line is that it truly realizes automatic sorting, automatic coding and automatic packaging, which reduces costs and increases efficiency very significantly." Shen Changpeng concluded.
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