Session: Research Posters

Paper Number: 119402

119402 - Design of Fully Automatic Drum Filling Machine in Chemical Manufacturing Processes 

As smart factories gain attention, automatic production system are constantly advancing technologies to improve productivity and safety.  There has been numerous research regarding the filling machine to automate in package industry such as food, chemistry, oil and et al. In particular, liquid(drum) filling machines are primarily utilized to package products into drums after manufacturing process in the hazardous chemical industry. Most existing filling machines allow the operator to open the drum lid and inject the product directly, and set the injection capacity only to the standard drum. However, this research suggests the design of a fully automatic drum filling machine for various types of drum (IBC tank, 200L steel drum, 20L drum) in chemical manufacturing. The filling machine design mainly consists of an injection nozzle, a traverse system, a vision sensor, a torque sensor, a cap opener, load cells, and et al. The injection nozzle and traverse system can raise and lower the nozzle and inject an accurate amount of liquid into the drums. The vision sensor can track the inlet location of various types of drums. A 2D image of the top of the drum is acquired using the vision sensor, and the position is calculated by extracting feature points from the image. Through the proposed algorithm, the coordinates of the injection hole can be calculated after extracting the feature points. Through the position information of the identified inlet, the drum filling machine can be moved to automatically fill the liquid. The torque sensor and the cap opener can automatically open and close the lid of the drum. By utilizing two load cell system under the roller conveyor, the weight of the product can be measured.  Also, electronic weighting techniques present the management with rapid, timely, and accurate information that provided quick response times. The rollers of the roller conveyor are separated inside and outside for safety purposes, and in case of any unexpected applied load, the outside rollers are stationary. When the charged drum is transported to the end of the conveyor, the sensor detects then stops the conveyor, and unloads the drum. The proposed fully automatic liquid drum machine can calculate the position of the injection hole and inject the exact amount of liquid so that it is possible to inject the product by automatically moving the injection nozzle. Therefore, it is expected that the developed filling machine will give more production and reduce human efforts without risk for the chemical packaging industry.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This results were supported by "Regional Innovation Strategy(RIS)" through the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education(MOE). (2021RIS-003)

 

Presenting Author: Junsik Lee Changshin Univeristy

Presenting Author Biography: Junsik Lee is currently a professor at Changshin University in Korea. He worked for the
Department of Extreme Thermal System at Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials as a
post-doctoral researcher. He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering from
Saint Louis University, the USA in 2014. His current research interests are related to air cooling
for gas turbines, thermal & fluid, machine automation, fire cooling, and et. al

Authors:

Junsik Lee Changshin Univeristy
Jun Ho Lee J-Mecha Tech