Vibratory bowl feeders are required in almost all industries where small components need to be handled. A very basic and most required component which needs handling is caps of bottles. Feeding of caps is required in pharmaceutical and FMCG industries, mainly for capping. The tooling technique used for orienting of caps is called “scallops”. These scallops need to be located on the top side of the bowl, after the caps are made to come out in a single lane. The scallops have to be designed in such a way that in case the cap comes with open side facing ground, it falls back into the bowl while only the caps with the “open side up” go forward. This way, only one type of cap is taken forward. This is made possible as the scallops are designed in such a way that the scallop fits inside the cap, in case it comes with open side facing ground and causes it to loose its balance and fall down. In other words, the cap is travelling on its edges, which in turn fall through the gaps in the tooling. In case the cap comes with open side up, there is a lot of support to it and it does not fall down. In case there is a variety of caps to be fed in the same bowl, one just needs to make separate scallops for each of the caps. These scallops need to be changed as and when the cap to be fed changes. Elscint has standardized the size of the scallops and hence, customers can just order scallops for a different size of cap in case their cap changes in the future. A photo of scallops is shown below.
