Design and Development of Carton Tray Forming Machine

Abstract

Carton folding is a packaging operation performed by human or with fixed automa- tion to form a desire dimension box from a plane carton blank. Lots of advance automatons and mechanisms were developed to meet the requirement of packaging industries. Huge variety of packs and cartons are used for packaging. Dedicated speficial purpose machines were developed for special forming operations and for mass production. However in consumer market demands are changing constantly with variety and innovation. This scenario results in a large amount of short run and small batch production with associated large changeover time. Further, it is uneco- nomical to produce a dedicated machine for small batch production. The packaging industries faces these all challenges and in developing countries the challenges are more severe in terms of cost economy of packaging system. These becomes an objective of present dissertation. In this project, an attempt has been made to design and develop an economical packaging machine that perform tray forming operation on plane carton blanks of different sizes. The development of assemblies and mechanism that forms the carton tray using Fixture matrix to accommodate different sizes has been explained. Carton blank is folded by moving it through a fixture by meane of segmented die-stamp matrix which plays a role of plunger pusher. This concept involves a synchronized design of mechanism to minimize the changeover time of machine to run for different size. The Challenges of the project include less driving and power systems, accurate synchronization of mechanism, cost effective and reliable design. A distinct challenge is to eliminate use of pneumatic and hydraulic systems to take advantages of low operating and maintenance cost, requirement of single power source for operating and mobility of system.