New bag emptying station from WITTMANN for comfortable granulate feeding right from the start

With a new automatic bag emptying station, WITTMANN increases the efficiency in supplying injection molding machines with granulate from raw material bags. During development, the focus was on achieving a high degree of flexibility.

Granulate feeding during injection molding is a time- and manpower-consuming process, especially when processing many different materials on a large number of machines. But sufficient personnel and time are rarely available. This sharpens the focus on automatic materials handling. With its most recent solution, WITTMANN offers automation right from the start with emptying the granulate bags. The bags are unstacked from the pallet, then opened, emptied and disposed of, all fully automatically. As a first step, the new solution will be offered on the German market.

Flexible due to automatic detection of positioning
In its standard version, the new automatic bag emptying station comes with two pallet racks and one linear robot. Its modular design makes it possible to adjust the size of the system precisely to the processor’s requirements and the conditions at the installation site. 
During ongoing production, the new solution also offers ample flexibility, since the robot recognizes the positioning of the bags on the pallet. Therefore, partially unloaded pallets can also be unstacked efficiently and safely. Like all automation solutions from WITTMANN, the automatic bag emptying station is equipped with a full-fledged R9 control system, which ensures intuitive operation. The R9 also substantially facilitates the integration into existing IT infrastructures as well as system solutions with other components from WITTMANN.

In-line recycling of empty bags
The robot picks up the raw material bags one by one. Then it opens each bag automatically and fills the granulate into the container provided until the set target quantity has been reached. 

The empty bags are deposited separately to be passed on to recycling. As an option, a granulator can be integrated into the bag emptying station, which enables regrinding of the empty bags directly on site.