Gripping thin items

Beerthai Co. Ltd. is a business unit of ThaiBev, the largest brewery group in Thailand. In its packaging line, robots pick up thin partitions and place them in packaging boxes for bottles. The grippers previously used left marks on the thin cardboard packaging. FIPA offered a more satisfactory solution by recommending the GR04.100H gripper with replaceable HNBR soft contact pads.

 

The HNBR gripper is normally used mainly in the plastics industry to demold workpieces out of the injection molding machine without scratching them. Such applications must provide high temperature resistance of up to 160°C, must be free of paint-wetting impairment substances (PWIS) and ensure gentle handling. 

 

 

With their soft pads, the HNBR grippers are also applied outside of the plastics industry. After a test showed that the grippers did not leave any pressure marks on the thin cardboard, Beerthai approved the grippers for use in production. The grippers have now proven themselves in the  dynamic system, which has a cycle time of 7 seconds and packs 8 boxes per minute. Further packaging lines with FIPA grippers as End-of-Arm-Tooling on the robot are being planned.

 

The project developer from Beerthai stressed the advantages of the FIPA grippers with soft pads. The soft HNBR pads ensure that the cardboard packaging is handled gently and worn HNBR pads can be replaced without dismantling the grippers, saving both time and money. In addition, the gripper is a proven standard product that is also available in Thailand.