At this year's Zünd booth, everything revolves around efficient automated cutting of a wide variety of packaging materials – from solid and corrugated cardboard to protective foam. Among other solutions, a fully automated material-handling system demonstrates what maximum process reliability in digital cutting looks like in a real life.
With its versatile automation options, Zünd offers numerous possibilities for sustained increases in profitability. The palette ranges from automatic tool changers and collaborative robotics to fully integrated production lines with completely automated material handling. At Fachpack in Nuremberg (Hall 8, Booth 518), Zünd presents the recently developed BHS150 loading/unloading system for use in industrial production environments. With a stack height of up to 1.5 m, this automation solution offers significantly longer uninterrupted operation, which translates into highly efficient, economical production of long runs. To demonstrate uninterrupted cutting without automatic material-handling, Zünd is exhibiting a G3 cutter configured for processing corrugated cardboard and packaging foam in tandem operation. With this setup, material loading and unloading occur while the machine continues producing without interruption. The cutting system is also equipped with an automatic tool changer ARC, which can accommodate up to eight different bits. This option helps the operator keep track of his tools at all times, minimizes the time required for retooling, and thus makes for even more efficient use of the cutting/routing system.
Aleksandar Lazic, Segment Manager Packaging, explains: «Packaging manufacturers have to produce under constant time and margin pressures. Our modular cutting and material-handling solutions address their individual automation needs and make digital finishing even more efficient and profitable». Collaborative robot technology is an example of this. Zünd uses a robotic arm from Universal Robots to demonstrate a configuration suitable for industrial applications. The robot picks finished parts off a Zünd S3 cutting system and places them at predefined locations.
Smart production planning, control, and monitoring are critical for efficient manufacturing. The Zünd Cut Center ZCC user interface and workflow software provides the user with a comprehensive virtual control center for end-to-end digital finishing. With new features such as even faster registration methods and a well laid-out dashboard that continually displays performance data of the cutting systems in operation, the latest version of ZCC, Version 3, is now even more flexible and user friendly.
