Technology/IT ¦ IDM
Achim Baumgärtner,
Executive Assistant at Leupolz,
is enthusiastic about the
cheese maintenance system.
standards, but is also impressive in terms of performance, with
around 80 cheese wheels passing through the system in the space
of an hour. The task of the TX200L HE (HE = Humid Environment)
is to load and unload racks with either four or eight shelves on
which the cheese wheels are stored. A forklift collects the racks
from the maturation chamber, delivers them to the processing
area, and returns them afterwards.
The six-axis robot is equipped with a special gripper that resembles
the prongs of a forklift. It uses this to pick up the wooden
board on which the cheese rests and places it on the system’s conveyor
belt. The next step is to separate the board from its cheese
wheel. The board is then cleaned, while the cheese is washed,
brushed, sprayed with salt and dried with a blower. The final step
is to place the cheese wheel back on its board and move it to a defined
transfer position on the conveyor belt. Here, the TX200L HE
picks it up and places the board together with the cheese wheel
back in the correct compartment of the rack.
To ensure that the six-axis machine can approach all stations
without hindrance, it is mounted on a base unit. The TX200L has
a reach of just under 2.6 meters, and with a total weight of 100
kilograms to be handled (80-kg cheese wheel, 5-kg wooden board
and 15-kg gripper), axis 6 operates at its full payload limit.
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Hygienic robots in preference to
problematic linear axes
To realize this vision, they brought in Lemmermeyer, a plant manufacturer
based in the Bavarian town of Deiningen. The company
has extensive experience in the field of stainless steel plant construction
and has built an especially strong reputation for itself in
the food sector.
The stainless steel cheese maintenance system, which entered
operation in 2019, is a prime example of Lemmermeyer’s design
expertise. Attention was paid to compliance with stringent hygiene
standards, avoidance of dead spaces, and the right choice
of robot for handling the cheese wheels – in this case, the large
six-axis Stäubli TX200L HE.
“If we had used classic linear axes for the handling processes
within the plant, we would have come up against a major hygiene
obstacle,” says Manfred Görthofer, Head of Project Management
at Lemmermeyer. “Condensation buildup and lubricant contamination
via the joints of the axes could not have been avoided, and
this is of course problematic when processing unwrapped foodstuffs.
That’s why we are increasingly moving towards the use of
encapsulated Stäubli robots with their superior hygiene design for
such processes.”
80 cheese wheels per hour
The Leupolz setup clearly demonstrates that the robot-assisted
cheese maintenance system not only complies with strict hygiene
we design and engineer
food processing facilities.
/www.foodfab.eu
/www.atp.ag
/www.atp.ag
/www.foodfab.eu
/www.atp.ag
