Doyen Medipharm, based in Norfolk in the UK, offers wound care and transdermal patch manufacturers several solutions for single- and multi-lane collation of flat pouched products.
The collating systems are designed to fit with the standard outfeed conveyor of their packaging machines and are electronically controlled, making quick and easy product size changeovers possible.
Options available for the collators include shingling conveyors, which can be operated to collate pouches for cartoning. These units receive the packs from the 4SS discharge and transfer them to the shingling position. Fully electronic control enables the automatic counting of close shingles of 3 to 50 packs at optimum speed, with a predetermined overlap leaving a gap between the shingled pouch stacks.
A more advanced option is a stacker collator for multi-lane operation, allowing high speed counting and stacking of transdermal patch sachets or wound dressing packs. In this process, the stream of packs in each lane is diverted to the respective stacking position, where the packs are counted and stacked into plastic trays.
Doyen's collating systems are ergonomically designed and said to make pouch stacks easy to handle. Operators can easily pick up the stacks and place them into cartons, reducing the time taken to collect and group the pouches accurately, thus increasing the operating speed of end of line packaging equipment.
Doyen offers full line integration: converting, packaging, cartoning and outerwrapping technology and other ancillary equipment with guaranteed performance.
Neil Andrews, vice president of sales and marketing, said: 'Line automation has a major impact on production performance; with the help of add-ons like auto splice systems, vision systems and collators, performance of our machines at high speeds can be increased by up to 30%."