Design and Optimization of Poucher Machine

Abstract

Poucher machines have wide scope in packaging products like chocolate, pickle, grains to liquid detergents. Much technological advancement has been carried out to incorporate automation. From forming of pouch from the roll of web, filling and sealing everything is carried out automatically.

Poucher machine can also produce pouches of grain (wheat, rice, dal etc.) products, with certain design modifications to incorporate the capacity change. The current machine has many components made of aluminium alloy material for wash down requirement, which leads to high cost. The prime objective of this work is to replace mounting plates of aluminium used in existing machine to mild steel plates with stainless steel cladding. This has been initiated to handle pouch having weight from 200 gm to 5 kg. From cost analysis it has been observed that it is a cost effective solution compared to aluminium mounting plates used in poucher machine. The base frame of the machine assembly is fabricated by welding solid members of rectangular cross-section, which is an over-designed structure. Hence, optimization of base frame structure has been carried out and it is observed that the weight of the base frame has been reduced to 30 % without any compromise to the strength of the base frame.

In rotary pouching machine the critical component is rotating turret as it rotates intermittently. Also the diameter of the turret pate is considerable even for a small amount of mass suspended at the periphery. Hence it is the most critical part because of the centrifugal force generated due to the weight of the pouches and the weight of the disc itself. As it has complex cutouts and tapping the effect the centrifugal forces has been studied by static structural analysis using ANSYS. From analysis results it has been observed that the existing design can be optimized. And hence turret plate topology optimization has been carried out using “INSPIRE” CAE software tool. Optimized plate thickness and shape of the turret plate is observed to be very encouraging.