Friction Feeders
CED has developed two friction feeders. Both use our Thickness Compensating separator technology – and are known as the TCF Series friction feeders.
The Thickness Compensating separator technology makes set-up much easier than conventional feeders as there is no setting of a feed ‘gate’ to suit the stock thickness. Instead, the separators float, automatically rising and lowering to suit.
There are three benefits to this technology:
• The separation method automatically compensates for separator belt wear so that periodic readjustment is not necessary
• Faster change-over times
• The feeder can feed stock of mixed thickness. Similarly, if the stock varies in thickness along the sheet, this is also catered for.
Typical uses are for counting and batching:
• Sleeves
• Pouches
• Bags
• Envelopes (both new and filled)
• Cards
There are two versions of the TCF feeder, with the recently-introduced Mini TCF being added to cater for smaller cards and tickets.
The feeders are licensed to Vacuumatic Ltd. of Colchester, U.K. for manufacture and sale. Click here to view the products, specifications and videos.
Systems
Using the friction feeder as a basis, larger systems are produced to include application specific features. This most frequently involves the addition of a barcode reader to verify that the stock being fed has not been mixed up.
The systems that we produce are modular so that we can offer a solution that is tailored to a particular requirement.
The video below shows a system which includes many of the features currently available.
This machine is feeding filled envelopes. Within the address window is a barcode which must be read to check against a production database. Any envelopes containing unreadable barcodes are diverted for manual processing.
The output of this system is a shingled stream onto a conveyor. End-of-Batch is identified by displacing a batch header on the conveyor.
Also included on this system is a doubles detect feature which causes the machine to halt if two envelopes are stuck together.
Please enquire to discuss your particular requirement.