Smurfit Sheetfeeding went to Palamatic Handling Systems to solve a problem with the handling of wooden pallets, lifting from a stack to feed a pallet loading station.
The repetitive nature of the process was seen as a potential manual handling problem.
Palamatic came up with a vacuum tube lifting system to deal with pallets of different sizes (including Euro pallets) ranging from to 25 – 80 kg. The pallets are pushed along a conveyor underneath the corrugated boards and these are then strapped for transportation. The equipment installed was a vacuum lifting system complete with mechanical forks to grip the pallets. The unit was suspended on an ergonomic light-weight aluminium bridge crane gantry system to cover a large operating area.
