Elscint has manufactured a pipette feeding, placement equipment. The pipette were fed through a vibratory bowl feeder in two rows. After accumulating 12 pipettes per row in two rows, a vacuum gripper with 12+12 fingers picked up the pipettes and placed them into two boxes simultaneously. There were 8 columns and 12 rows in each box. The placement of all the pipettes in the two boxes (192 pipettes) took less than 2 minutes, thus providing a speed of 1 box per minute. For this vacuum grippers as well as electrical slides were used for easy movement of the pipettes. Further the boxes were aligned manually on a conveyor in two rows with space of 10+10 empty boxes and 10+10 filled boxes. During the placement of the pipettes in the boxes, the boxes were stopped and released with pneumatic cylinders. The pipettes were having lengths of 80 mm and diameter of 8 mm. However, there was a tendency of the pipettes to get into each other and come out as a “train”. This resulted in the pipettes not getting engaged properly. However, proper tooling inside the bowl feeder ensured that the “train” was disengaged and the pipettes fed properly.

The requirement being for a pharmaceutical company, all the touching parts were manufactured in SS 316 while the conveyor and stands were either plated or powder coated.

The equipment was supplied with a S7-200 PLC of Siemens make. SMC make pneumatics and electrical slides were used in the equipment.