ONE of Europe's leading manufacturers of heat-sealing machines, Packaging Automation, represented by MPI Australia , has upgraded its flagship Vision range to operate at even faster speeds.
The company's top of the range Vision models, which are capable of atmospheric and modified atmosphere packing including gas flushing, vacuum and high oxygen, have all been upgraded to now operate at a 25% faster throughput.
Based on sealing six packs per cycle, the Vision 4000 is now capable of a speed of 100 packs a minute and the Vision 182 based on sealing three packs per cycle, can now operate at 60 packs a minute.
Packaging Automation says the speeds are reliant on the product being suitable for transfer at this speed into the machine - with the key determining factor being the viscosity of the actual product.
UK-based Packaging Automation commercial manager Sam Ashton said as food processing equipment became more and more sophisticated, food producing factories were required to be more efficient and be capable of turning around orders at greater speeds.
“This has resulted in older manufacturing lines being replaced with new equipment, but with the introduction of greater efficiencies, the bottlenecks simply move further down the production line.
"Ultimately the final bottleneck in any facility will be the packaging machine at the end of a line. Hence, following increased speeds in a wide range of processing equipment, the day has finally come when packaging equipment must also support increased production speeds."
Packaging Automation is keen to stress that the increased speed is not at the expense of flexibility which is an important factor in the design of all its Vision and PA range of machines.
Therefore, the latest generation of Vision offers both high speed and flexibility, allowing product range tooling changes in just a matter of minutes.