Automated handling of vials and pens

A biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny uses a Schu­bert-Phar­ma sys­tem to pack­age vials and pens to admin­is­ter a pre­cise­ly dosed amount of med­i­cine. A total of 13 dif­fer­ent for­mats are pack­aged on the line. The prod­ucts require extra-spe­cial care. With the vials, glass break­age has to be avoid­ed and the pens should not be acti­vat­ed pre­ma­ture­ly dur­ing the pack­ag­ing process. For this rea­son, the pens, espe­cial­ly, could not pre­vi­ous­ly be han­dled in a ful­ly auto­mat­ed manner.
The TLM sys­tem from Schu­bert enables sig­nif­i­cant­ly increased effi­cien­cy, while sav­ing pro­duc­tion costs. At the same time, the pack­ag­ing solu­tion offers high-lev­el flex­i­bil­i­ty and very pre­cise han­dling. The inte­grat­ed 3D cam­era deter­mines the posi­tion of each and every pen and pass­es this data on to the F4 pick & place robot for high­ly accu­rate prod­uct picking.
Facts & figures
A total of 13 for­mats (pens & vials)
Pens:

• As one-count and two-count packages
• 75 car­tons per minute for both 1ct and 2ct formats

Vials:

• 300 prod­ucts per minute infeed from the upstream labelling machine, up to 100 car­tons per minute depend­ing on format
• 2 dif­fer­ent vial sizes (3 cc and 5 cc); option: 50 cc and 100 cc

End-pack­ag­ing prod­uct configuration:

• 1ct: 100 car­tons per minute
• 3ct: 100 car­tons per minute
• 4ct: 75 car­tons per minute
• 5ct: 60 car­tons per minute
• 6ct: 50 car­tons per minute