Pouches in vogue

Pouches are in vogue. Stand-up film pouches, for instance, are causing quite a stir on the packaging market, with growth rates into two figures. Consumers, manufacturers, and retailers are well aware of the many advantages of the pouch and there’s good reason for it’s popularity. With their minimum amount of packaging material, low weight, easy handling, and low-cost, pouches score on both the economical and ecological front.

The US company Bartelt has decisively shaped the market for pouching machines from the start. Only when KHS effected a full takeover of Bartelt in 2003, however, were the foundations laid upon which to further build up the company’s leading position. The synergy potentials of this pooling of expertise have now been manifested in the completely new Innopouch K series, an innovative, shining light in the KHS Bartelt portfolio (see The series heroes).

With its new machine concept, the Innopouch K series is unique to the market. All movements are servo assisted, resulting a full range of customer benefits, which include the shortest possible changeover times, low operator involvement, and high line availability. This brings about a definite drop in costs for warehousing, personnel, shipping, and administration and with lower processing times the customer has added flexibility. The Innopouch K series enables producers to perfectly master rapid changes in market demand. The machine is variable and can be perfectly adapted to suit individual customer requirements at practically all stages in the process.

The Innopouch K series can extract ready-made pouches from a pouch dispenser, such as stand-up pouches with zippers, and fill and seal them. In its FFS or form, fill, and seal version it can also produce pouches from suitable roll-fed film materials.

Ultrasound sealing has the advantage that pouches are sealed absolutely tight, regardless of whether there’s any product in the seam between the sheets of film or not.

This incredibly time-consuming conversion process on mechanical machines is performed by the Innopouch K-400, the Innopouch K flagship, at the push of a button using magnetic levitation technology (linear servo technology). This makes it one of the fastest convertible machines on the market, which can run in simplex or duplex operation while retaining all the advantages of the regular K series. In duplex operation the machine output increases up to 140 pouches per minute. In practice the actual capacity of course depends on the product to be filled and the film and zipper materials used.

The four standard filling stations of the machine cover about 95% of all applications yet can be expanded if required. Screw-fed fillers, table feeders, or sliding gate fillers are used for volumetric filling, depending on the product. When combined with a belt weigher, information can also be fed back to the volumetric dosing system, for instance. This automatically corrects the required pouch fill weight (trend controller). Accuracy is important when filling expensive ingredients or medical recipes. For this purpose, multihead weighers calculate the correct weight by combining the individual control scales.

Besides supplying a pouching machine, KHS can of course also provide the corresponding folded box/side-loading cartoner and the grouping stations and pocket conveyors (infeed belts) needed between the poucher and cartoner. The products/pouches are then synchronously fed into the cartoner and gently pushed into the box from the side.

Conclusion: whatever the customer needs, the Innopouch K series tailor makes the relevant pouch according to ­specifications. KHS also supplies complete packaging lines, including cartoners and palletizers.