Syntegon launches flexible discharge station for confectionery in product protection boost

05 Jul 2022 --- Syntegon is launching a flexible discharge station for round cookies, crackers and biscuits, branded the Distribution Continuous Slide (DCS). The modular discharge system consists of one or more stations arranged one behind the other. These are equipped with belt slides for gentle handling, minimizing mechanical stress and thus reducing product breakage and loss. 

The DCS distributes cookies onto belt legs, packing them flat or on-edge into pile, slug or tray packs. The system’s guard-free design provides operators unrestricted process visibility, safe accessibility and easy cleaning. 

“Due to the price-sensitive market environment, food manufacturers need to focus on solutions that deliver maximum efficiency gains. Therefore, the Syntegon DCS is designed with a low total cost of ownership,” says Syntegon’s global product manager Daniel Bossel.

“Our goal was to develop an innovative and product-friendly system that equips food companies for the challenges of the future. Already we have customers confirm that we have managed to do just that with the DCS discharge station – and a patent for the technology is also pending.”

Belt slides for stream division
Cookies, biscuits and crackers are taken from the cooling conveyor and are continuously distributed to the leg belts. They are neither pushed nor dropped but slide over the belts and are thereby protected from any mechanical stress. This reduces product loss significantly and leads to efficiency gains, especially when handling particularly sensitive products.

The higher the speed of the belt slide, the more cookies are transferred to downstream leg belts by the DCS. On the individual legs, a further belt slide arranges the straight product stream into an S-shape. 

This arrangement ensures the cookies and crackers are evenly distributed across the entire width of the belt, preventing them from wedging or overlapping. A homogeneous product stream is created, ensuring a constant feed to the packaging machine.Cookies distributed through the DCS system.

Adjusting leg belt performance
The DCS system is equipped to handle briefly fluctuating production volumes intelligently, triggered, for example, by the failure of a packaging leg, says Syntegon. 

“Individual discharge stations can run at full speed to avoid production loss,” explains Bossel. 

“If the product build-up on a leg belt becomes too long, the DCS automatically discharges fewer products onto that leg. At the same time, it distributes the surplus to the next stations, automatically increasing their discharge capacity.”

“All legs can continue to operate constantly – until the product storage is empty. In this way, the DCS enables maximum storage times with minimum storage lengths – a significant efficiency advantage.”

Flexibility for varying formats
The smart design of the Syntegon DCS also provides high format flexibility: no format parts are installed in the discharge station. For a format change, it is sufficient to modify the belt speeds via the HMI module and save them as a new format. Additional safety guarding is unnecessary with the new DCS system.

With flat feeders, chicane conveyors arrange the products into columns and feed them to the packaging machine in a constant product stream. With on-edge handling, products are gently transported by vibration to the packaging leg in “ZF” vibratory channels. 

The discharge station requires shorter vibratory channel lengths than conventional solutions to achieve the same storage times – another important layout and cost advantage. In addition, manufacturers can add further DCS stations to the discharge system on a modular basis. In this manner, larger production volumes can be handled if the oven capacity is later expanded.

The flexibility of the machine and its optimized design create the efficiency of the construction, claims Syntegon. The design of the conveyors used within the DCS also makes additional safety guarding unnecessary. 

Since cleaning requires only a few manual steps, downtimes are reduced. Operators can easily view each process step and reach all machine sections for maintenance purposes.

Edited 

By Louis Gore-Langton