Packaging Corner: Keep your existing palletizers in service

With more than 50 years of manufacturing automatic high- and low-level conventional palletizers, vonGAL, a product line of Premier Tech Chronos, has 3,500 machines in operation today on packaging lines throughout North America.

To help facilities keep existing palletizers in service for as long as possible, vonGAL offers a variety of safety and control retrofits. “Companies see that our newest machines offer standard safety and control features that were options and upgrades just three years ago—and they want them,” explains Phillip Edwards, operations director.

Among those enhancements are light curtains, safety relays, Category 3 electrical interlocks on doors and gates, and other guarding devices that ensure operator safety. “We have a dedicated sales, engineering and installation team to manage these retrofit services,” he adds.

“We’ve also developed a much simpler way to reset the machine after a light curtain is triggered,” he says. “In the past, resets were a multi-step procedure that customers found confusing. Today, it’s done with a simple key switch that only takes a few seconds.”

Further retrofits include highly intuitive, human-machine interface (HMI) touchscreen controls that display a variety of three-dimensional graphics. Among the screens, a map of the full machine highlights the area where a safety device was tripped for faster location and reset. Other HMI functions display diagnostics and troubleshooting support for operation and maintenance issues.

“The graphics on the newest touchscreen controls also make it much easier for on-the-fly programming of new load building patterns,” Edwards says. “When a customer receives their new machine, all the patterns they currently use are pre-programmed. But today, with the variety of products handled, different stacking patterns are introduced all the time. This function allows a user to install a new pattern—or modify an existing one—directly from the HMI.”

Older machine controls included push buttons or very basic touch functions, requiring a laptop and programming skills to make significant changes. Now, modifications can be done quickly and simply with a touchscreen.

“The new control packages also offer multiple levels of authorization—allowing password access for operations, supervisors and engineers—for optimized machine performance and better accountability,” Edwards added.

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