PJP recently supplied three bespoke off-feed conveyors for a major plastics extrusion company to facilitate their ability to make pipes for domestic and commercial settings. The system needed to take extrusion sections directly off the production line and deposit them into stillages.

The various demands of heating, drainage and plumbing require a multitude of different length pipes, therefore we needed to create a moveable end-stop to allow for different cut lengths of product.

The conveyor system was made from a robust mild steel construction and needed to be mobile to allow it to move between different production lines for maximum versatility and ROI for the customer.

PJP were tasked with the design, build, installation and commissioning of a high-speed sortation solution. This ended up being part of one of the largest conveyor systems we’ve ever supplied!

The remit was to sort shoe boxes into 102 destinations following a pick process spread over a three-level warehouse using 30 pickers. The pick process and transport conveyors (also supplied and installed by PJP) can output a shoe box at a rate of one per second so the sortation solution needed to keep up with this extremely quick rate. 

PJP compared many bi-directional product transfer units and, following various tests and consultations, we selected the Itoh Denki ‘F-Rat’ 24v transfer unit due to low noise, efficient transfer, high speed 24v technology and low maintenance. The units also allow product separation and even give a zero-line pressure feature for complete stability and accuracy which is essential when handling a huge range of box sizes at this speed: anything from 150mm x 150mm up to 600mm x 600mm.

We were approached by a pet-food supplier to look at ways they could streamline their end of line / despatch process. Traditionally, it is this area – the critical order despatch process – that can be a bottleneck for many operations.

The specific challenge was to design a transport conveyor which could deliver totes of picked product to sixteen dedicated packing benches. It then needed to allow operators to pack the products into delivery cartons, apply a courier label and then send the completed order to a single despatch location. There could be no walking with, or lifting of, any product during the process.

To achieve this, PJP designed a bespoke two-tier conveyor system that does the following:

• The top tier delivers totes to packing bench positions using Zero-Line Pressure (ZLP) technology to ensure no collisions or finger traps occur during use – health & safety is a very important factor for us and our clients.
• Specially designed packing benches (workstations) then allow operators to simply slide the tote onto their workstation and process it.
• Once complete, operators use the lower tier by sliding the completed, boxed order onto a small decline belt, which automatically drives every box in the warehouse to the dedicated despatch point. This is achieved via an intelligent traffic light system with no interaction required from operators.

PJP have designed and built a mild-steel conveyor system which is performing well at The Range. Line-shaft driven rollers and a Zero-Line Pressure (ZLP) system now take parcels of products efficiently around from packing benches to lorry loading bays. The parcels are individually separated and distributed straight to docked lorries via flexible conveyors using 90-degree F-RAT transfers which divert boxes accordingly and ensure the right parcel gets to the correct lorry.

A customer contacted us requiring a bespoke double lift system which needed to have bi-directional operation to manoeuvre a staggering 480 pallets per hour. It had to be fully controllable via an HMI screen and, as is often the case, the customer wanted as much to be automated as possible including an interface with collection robots (a type of Automated Guided Vehicle or AGV). The only manual intervention in the system was loading via pump trucks. To add to the challenge the weight the system had to handle was extremely variable: from 10kg to 2 Tonnes!  

Safety was, of course, paramount and there needed to be light guards and other mechanical guarding included in the design.