Load cell for high-speed packaging machinery

Damtech Egg-Han­dling BV spe­cialis­es in auto­mat­ed egg pro­cess­ing machin­ery and recent­ly, with the help of load mea­sure­ment spe­cial­ists Zemic Europe, devel­oped its lat­est E‑Grader 40 egg weigh­ing, sort­ing and pack­ag­ing sys­tem. With a max­i­mum capac­i­ty to grade 28800 eggs each hour and scal­able up to six lines, the state-of-the-art machine utilis­es Zemic’s L6N series sin­gle-point load cells in com­bi­na­tion with its Top-Sen­sors T1 weight trans­mit­ter to pro­vide high-speed pro­cess­ing at the rate of one mea­sure­ment per 300 ms.
Zemic, rep­re­sent­ed with full tech­ni­cal sup­port in the UK by Var­i­ohm EuroSen­sor, works close­ly with its cus­tomers to pro­vide solu­tions that dif­fer­en­ti­ate their mar­ket posi­tion. As weigh­ing was not a tech­nol­o­gy area that Damtech had encoun­tered pre­vi­ous­ly the two com­pa­nies’ com­bined their respec­tive skills in auto­mat­ed machin­ery and force sen­sors to devel­op the E‑Grader 40 which is aimed at farm­ers that sell their com­mer­cial egg pro­duce straight from the farm. These sup­ply sources are becom­ing increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar for con­sumers but are still sub­ject to the rig­or­ous qual­i­ty and leg­isla­tive reg­u­la­tions required of large pro­duc­ers. The machine can han­dle 5 dif­fer­ent grade class­es between 43 and 73 grams.

Zemic’s L6N load cell and the T1 weight trans­mit­ter pro­vid­ed best fit com­po­nents for the machine where the anodised alu­mini­um-alloy and IP65 rat­ed sin­gle point load cell with OIML approval offered a max­i­mum plat­form size of 350 x 400 mm. This load cell is well proven for use in a vari­ety of appli­ca­tions and has a pedi­gree of use in the med­ical weigh­ing market.

The T1 weight trans­mit­ter is DIN rail mount­ed, has an inte­gral 6‑segment semi alphanu­mer­ic dis­play and takes care of set-up and cal­i­bra­tion — with a wide choice of out­put con­fig­u­ra­tions includ­ing ana­logue (volt­age and cur­rent) as well as USB and many com­mon­ly used field­bus pro­to­cols. For use with 1, 4 or 8 load cells, it pro­vides exci­ta­tion volt­age and load cell sig­nal con­ver­sion mak­ing inte­gra­tion with the cus­tomers’ con­trol sys­tem straight­for­ward as well as scalable.