Cam Activated Bottle Gripper
A high speed alcohol bottling line needed a lighter gripping head. We designed and SLS printed cam activated bottle grippers and a bottle sleeve that let the machine run faster.
On a bottling line every gram on the gripping head is a gram the machine has to accelerate and stop, thousands of times per shift. Our customer wanted more speed without a bigger drive, so the answer had to come from the tooling.
INDUSTRY
Beverage Bottling
PRODUCT
Cam Activated Bottle Gripper
Project Highlights
The Challenge
Machine speed was capped by the mass of the metal gripping head that had to be accelerated and stopped on every single cycle.
The Solution
Cam activated grippers take the open and close motion from the machine itself, with no dedicated actuator on the head, printed in nylon on industrial SLS machines.
Key Features
Printed gripper profiles match the exact bottle shape instead of approximating it with adjustable fingers, and the bottle sleeve is printed to suit the same container.
The Result
The lightweight construction reduced the moving mass of the gripping head and allowed the bottling machine to achieve a higher line speed.
