Abstract:
Industrial scale book manufacturing involves a large number of high-speed
machines which need to operate in a synchronised manner in order to deliver
higher efficiency and production output with minimum defects. It is a timely
requirement to automa te such machines in order to increase the production output
further. In this background, this project aimed to develop an automated book
packing and transferring system for one.pf tire leading book manufacturers in Sri
Lanka. At present, the output from the high-speed book making machine of the
particular manufacturer is handled manually and fed to the book packaging or
lamination machine placed at a different location. This involves considerably high
man power and there are ergonomic risks for the involved labour too. Furthermore,
there has been defects reported due to these poor material handling practices.
Accordingly, an automated book packing and transferring system was developed
which can process books at higher speeds matching with the capacity of the
upstream high-speed book making machine. Also, the system can stack different
sizes of books so that the packaging or the laminating machine can effectively work
at higher speeds. The developed system consists of a number of pneumatic
actuators, linear guides, bearings, human machine interfaces (HMIs) and a PLC
control panel. The proposed system has undergone a number to trial runs in the
factory flow conditions found to be performing in an acceptable level. However, a
number of further modifications have been identified in order to improve the
performance further, which will be addressed in due course.