Open Day for packers and palletizers at Claudius Peters

In his welcoming address, Reiner Frühling, Managing Director of Claudius Peters Group GmbH (CP), thanked his international audience for their strong interest in the event. He stressed the fact that the world market for packing and palletizing technology is now focusing on reliable, flexible, automated packing systems. As a wholly-owned subsidiary of Langley Holdings plc, a private-sector engineering group based in England, Claudius Peters Projects GmbH offers one-stop solutions for storage, packing, loading, palletizing and bulk loading plus big-bag installations. Established 1906 and integrated into Langley Holdings plc in 2001, CP presently has a workforce of approximately 560, roughly 410 of whom work in Buxtehude. Other CP locations include Dallas, São Paulo, Madrid, Bergamo, Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Illzach, Mumbai and the UK. The company’s mainstay products are plant & machinery along with aerospace components for clients like Airbus. At its well-known Buxtehuder Technical Centre, CP has a wide range array of test options for finding the best solutions for each customer’s own set of requirements. Not only are new materials tested, but the centre also optimizes storage, conveying and packing processes. Of course, the team agenda also includes research and development work, often in cooperation with universities and other educational institutions.

Packaging technology

Bernd Lübbert, Head of Packaging/Palletizing, informed the audience about the “Latest developments in Pacpal packing technology”.

He presented the easy-to-maintain, modular Pacpal system, one of which was later demonstrated as part of a plant tour. The Pacpal system combines a Roto Fill, an Inline Fill, a Bag Applicator, a Bag Loader, a Big Bag Fill and a choice of different palletizer units for layering 5000, 3000 or some other preferred number of bags/h. CP’s range of machines and turnkey systems is rounded out by plant automation and control systems. In this area, CP offers integrated automation for optimal efficiency with project- and customer-oriented solutions reflecting CP’s own high standards. All control systems can be integrated into existing systems.

Next, Lübbert presented a rundown of CP’s reference plants around the globe. In the meantime, the company lists more than 250 reference installations in the areas of cement, mortar and gypsum. Between 1996 and 2002, the company was particularly active in Asia, where packing and palletizing solutions were installed in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. Between 2005 and 2008, a spate of packing and loading solutions were provided for nine cement plants in Iran. In 2006–2008, CP broke into a new market with mortar plants for Maxit. Packing and loading plants for Indonesia constituted a key focus between 2008 and 2014. CP presently has a list of 29 references in Indonesia. The year 2014 saw the launching of palletizing system production in Glückstadt with a new partner, HSK GmbH Industrieanlagenbau Automatisierungstechnik International.

One of CP’s most recent commissions, a project in Bolivia, covers a Pacpal Roto Fill, a bag applicator, a bag discharge and a rejection system with bag trap plus a type-5000 palletizer with slip sheets. What makes this project so special is the plant’s high altitude, with accordingly special criteria to be met by all plant and machinery.

Yet another mainstay for CP is the spare-parts and after-sales service range. This includes pro­vision of original CP parts as well as data measurement, inspection, maintenance and training.

Reference plant LafargeHolcim in Höver

Territory Sales Manager Jan Paepcke reported on a packing plant with a 12-spout rotary packing machine that was erected at the Höver cement factory in 1998. Now in operation for more than 18 years, the plant has filled more than 100 million bags, or some 2 500 000 t of cement. At the time, the project’s main challenge was to accommodate the systems to the available headroom. At first, the plant was kept running round the clock, 6 days a week, i.e., nearly non-stop, which left little time for maintenance. Since then, though, packing time has been reduced to a single shift, 5 or 6 days a week, thus greatly facilitating maintenance operations. CP is particularly proud of the packing machine’s low energy consumption of 23 kW/h. Expenditures for maintenance and spare parts are also quite low, ranging between 0.4 and 0.5 €/t cement, including 0.17 to 0.23 €/t cement for spare parts.

Workshop and Technical Centre

After the theoretical part, the program had two key components in store for the four language groups: a workshop in the machine hall and at the Technical Centre. At eight different stations, the attendees were able to gather information on the engineering company’s expansive range of products.

Numerous pieces of equipment were demonstrated, including as highlights a Pacpal Roto Fill type R12ZL with automatic bag applicator and bag discharge equipment, a Pacpal Roto Fill type R8ZL, a Pacpal Big Bag Fill type B and a Pacpal Bag loader, a mobile loader and various other pieces of equipment. The guests were particularly impressed by the equipment’s ease of maintenance, as demonstrated on the Roto Fill type R8ZL. A number of essential maintenance operations were performed on that demonstration machine, which was built for a Turkish client. Another demonstration of on-the-job packing technology was given on a 12-spout packer destined for a customer in Bolivia. For big-bag packing tasks, CP is marketing a compact, modular machine concept for capacities up to 30 big bags/h and bag weights ranging from 500 to 2000 kg each.

Then, at the Technical Centre, the opportunities offered by the Claudius Peters Portal and Virtual Reality Tour were showcased. The purpose of this innovative “Inspired Excellence” project is to intelligently generate and interlink data. For CP, digitalization is mission-critical. The program serves to place all available project information at the customer’s disposal. Testing the requisite headsets, the visitors were quite impressed by the available options. The people in charge of the in-house laboratory first addressed the analytical options enjoyed by Claudius Peters and then introduced the corresponding equipment. Each year, some 150 analyses are performed, results of more than 14000 tests are available at the technical centre. In addition to a range of options for grain-size determination, including laser diffraction, the lab employs a number of different methods for determining density and several other analytical variants. The Technical Centre is equipped for performing experiments on scopes extending from laboratory-bench to full-scale.

Diverse handling equipment is available for use in configuring things like cement or gypsum conveying systems, e.g., pneumatic testing and sizing lines with lengths of 100 m, 800 m and even 5 km, the last-named serving to test out the effects of convoluted routes. It can handle 20 t/h.

One other focal point of the tour was the silo extraction system. With the help of this model silo, completely new insights can be gained on things like the flow behaviour of diverse materials. The transparent model gives the viewer an inside look at what goes on in a silo. Since the 1970s, Claudius Peters has sold some 700 silos, the largest of which had a diameter of 44 m. The largest diameter of an EC silo is 26 m as shown on the model.

The first day came to a close with a boat ride on the Elbe river, including a good on-water view of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall. The day’s last event, a buffet for all, provided ample opportunity to talk shop and review the day’s impressions with the CP team and professional colleagues.

Pacpal workshop in Glückstadt

The second day was devoted to the new type-5000 Pacpal Palletizer, so the group paid a visit to the HSK manufacturing plant in Glückstadt, which carries out production for CP. HSK has vast experience in the production of robotic systems and small palletizing systems with a high degree of in-house production depth.

CP offers a range of palletizers for various machine capacities (from 1450 to 5000 bags/h) and layer types (from 3-bag to 10-bag).

The new Pacpal Palletizer 5000 stands out due to its high performance (with a CP guarantee of 4200 bags/h for 50-kg bags in 5-bag ­layers), thanks in part to a unique high pallet infeed device. The visitors received detailed information about the new system and were able to see it in operation, after which they had opportunity to ask questions.

In closing the event, Bernd Lübbert, Head of Packaging/Palletizing, was happy to note that, on 22.11.2016, CP received an order  for South America for:

two silos with 500 t each, bulk loader

one Pacpal Roto Fill type R6ZL (90 t/h, 1800 bag/h)

one bag discharge and rejection system with bag trap

one Pacpal Palletizer type 3300 with slip sheets

The 2016 Open Days at Claudius Peters, with packers and palletizers as the key focus, offered a good mix of theory, practice and joint discussions providing a wealth of worthwhile information on this business segment.

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