Acmi was in charge of the realisation of an innovative end of line at the production site of the “Royal Brewery” of Manchester. The palletisation system was required to handle two can lines each  with a production capacity of 120.000 cans/hr with twenty-four different pack configurations, from 3x2 to 6x4. In order to respond to these requests Acmi proposed the Twisterbox layer formation system, patented in 2002 and allows the continuous layer formation with any format or any product. The Twisterbox system is composed of a series of robotised arms, three in this case, which contain selecting pliers capable of handling the product that are situated on the conveyor belt inside the machine. The packs that arrive from the conveyors enter inside the Twisterbox working area passing through a metering system which positions them at a distance predefined by the palletiser program and then manipulated until the desired configuration is composed.

Twisterbox advantages

The great advantage of this system is the total absence of mechanical intervention required on behalf of the operator, in fact the change over formats are exclusively commanded by the software. A further point to add to these characteristics is the lack of maintenance required and the high speed that the Twisterbox reaches even with the small packs with fragile contents such as 6 beer cans. The Twisterbox installed at Heineken is the second generation model with pliers constructed in carbon, which are lighter and thinner compared to the previous model. The reduction in thickness allows more packs to be handled inside the machine working area as the space required  between one pack and another to insert the pliers is less.

Faster HS (high speed)

Acmi created a special version of the Faster palletiser, named HS (high speed), capable of reaching the 600 layers per hour and improving the performance of the cycle formation of the pallet by 15% in comparison to the traditional model. This was made possible following a few technical modifications which allowed the pallet change over time to be reduced practically to zero. The completed pallets reach the two pallet stretch wrappers with rotating ring mod. Rotofilm 125 by means of a series of pallet conveyors, the stretch wrappers are placed in sequence, the first, is equipped with a double spool reel and automatic film change over. Both pallet stretchwrapper models are equipped with an inverter containing a potentiometer which regulates the speed of the rising and lowering of the winding spiral and the film tension. To summarise, the end of line installed at Heineken UK is composed of a series of pack conveyors equipped with automatic change over format, two Twisterbox layer formation systems, two palletisers  Faster HS models and four Rotofilm pallet stretch wrappers. The system guarantees a production capacity of  240.000 cans/hr and twenty four requested configurations including 3x2 with or without over packing.