Inadco - Quantity Checker
There are many of bagging lines where products are packed in bags and where, because of the poor flowing properties of the product, it is hard to have a high quantity and a high accuracy in filling level going together. Many of those products are dosed per Volume, because that is a much quicker way to fill the bags than doing the filling based on weight. That is because filling based on a weight always requires a scale and standstill waiting.
If you have to check the weight of each filling once the bag left the filling machine, you need an automatic Check weigher or you have to take multiple bags from the line and put them on a scale manually. The latter solution does not require to integrate a Check Weigher in your line, but it is very time-consuming.
Filling bags with a Volume doser always brings a dilemma: If you fill at a high flow, you can fill many bags per hour, but there can be a big variation in the filling level. On the other hand, if you fill at a lower flow, the variation most probably is (much) smaller, but the number of filled bags per hour can be substantially lower. Filling at such a lower rate is economically unattractive, so optimizing for the speed of filling and filling level of bags is an important issue. With the high flow, because of the variation per filling, it requires to weigh at least three consecutive filled bags to know if it is necessary to adjust your filling process. But that again, is economically unattractive.
Measuring the Weight of the filled bags
In many situations, one integrates a Checkweigher in the line so that there is no necessity to take bags from the line.
Most Check Weighers are units which have to be inserted in the line transport, and therefore if you integrate them afterwards, you have to change the setup of the line to accommodate for the required extra space. It is not only re-placing the filling machine, but also changing the feeding transport of that line, cabling, pneumatics, dust control systems and more…
The INADCO Quantity Checker is a unconventional check weigher and it has two main advantages. The first advantage is that this check weigher can be integrated inside one of the conveyors, thus not needing extra space. The second advantage is that the passing bag is weighed in the flow, so no downtime is required.
Each and every bag that is measured will be shown in a graph. The INADCO Quantity Checker stores the values of the last 1000 measured bags and default the last 20 measured bags of them will be displayed in the graph. By changing the value “Measures in 1 bar” the operator is allowed to see the trend of filling the bags in a much larger period of time.
When a bag, or the average of a group of bags, is outside the limit high the bar will be colored red. Is the measured value of the bag lower than the limit low the bar will be colored blue.
The INADCO system works with recipes.
The Production Manager or Quality Manager decide how they want the line to perform. It is not to be decided by the Operator!.
The recipe includes – amongst others – parameters for:
- The initial value of the Bulk Density, to be used if there is no measurement value yet available
- The Nominal filling level. (i.e. 70 L)
- The Minimal filling level. (i.e. 69 L) as lower limit for the displayed values
- The Nominal filling level. (i.e. 73 L) as maximum value for the displayed values
- The compression losses. In most cases because of the compression of the bag after filling, it requires to take into account that a certain percentage (around 3 %) should be filled extra INTO the bag to take the Nominal value OUT.
- Weight of the empty bag
- Fully automatic
- Easy to integrate
- No downtime during weighing