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SolidWorks software helps streamline the design of packaging machinery

Nearly every machine produced by a packaging machinery company is a one-of-a-kind creation – and for good reason: Producers of consumer goods strive to evolve containers into new shapes that appeal to continually changing customer needs and tastes. When building a custom machine, you have to get it right the first time; if you don’t, you may have to do it all over again – at your own expense. SolidWorks® software offers many capabilities that can help you meet the unique design challenges of the packaging machinery industry, such as top-down design, production-level 2D drawings, configurations, design validation tools, and more.

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Top-down assembly design

The top-down design of SolidWorks software allows you to efficiently model your machines, which typically are composed of thousands of parts. In addition, you can make changes on the fly, without increasing the opportunity for error. You can also tie together interrelated components; so if one changes, the related components will also change.

“Top-down design creates a symbiosis between your parts,” says Mark Monaghan, designer for Hartness International, Inc. Located in Greenville, South Carolina, the company designs innovative and versatile packaging machinery for manufacturers across a variety of industries. “Once you have that link set up in the design concept phase, modifying that one thing will dynamically change anything else affected by that modification – it’s a very useful tool,” notes Monaghan.

Production-ready engineering drawings

With SolidWorks, you can communicate design specifications clearly with section, detail, auxiliary, and isometric views that you can generate without drawing a single line or arc.

SolidWorks software enables you to easily use 3D assemblies to quickly create production-ready 2D drawings, thereby eliminating time-consuming redesigns at the drawing board. Canada-based Automation Tooling Systems (ATS) Inc., the world’s leader in industrial automation, has taken this concept one step further.

ATS is dedicated to designing and manufacturing advanced factory automation systems, custom automation equipment, and standard automation products, including packaging machinery. “We have built custom automation routines inside of SolidWorks that use API calls to automatically create drawings,” says Paul Lucier, CAD and Data Management Coordinator. “With just the click of a button, we can automatically create the sheet title block, and populate the drawing with three views and an isometric view. Based on the number of designers here, we can generate thousands of drawings per week, tens of thousands per year,” adds Mike Baljak, CAD Support.

“Inside of a drawing, you can make a section view of any assembly or any component, in any direction, without even thinking about it,” says Lucier. “Generating section views in a 2D CAD package is not an easy thing to do. But in SolidWorks, the section view is generated almost instantly.”

Configuration management
To succeed in this business, where the idea of mass customization is an everyday reality, you must be able to create new machines rapidly and easily. With SolidWorks software, you can reuse previous design work to create multiple variations of a product in a single document. Plus, you can develop and manage families of parts and models with different dimensions, components, properties, or other parameters.

Configurations allow IPG to take a single design and automatically create different sizes, capacities, and features,

“Configurations in SolidWorks allow us – on the same model and drawings – to have multiple variations of the same part, and to vary a part dimension to use it in different models,” says Christian Beaudry, engineering and production manager at Intertape Polymer Group (IPG) Inc.

With headquarters in both Florida and Canada, IPG is a recognized leader in the development and manufacture of specialized polyolefin plastic and paper packaging products, as well as complementary packaging systems. IPG offers a complete line of machines used for sealing boxes and cartons. “When only the length and material change, configurations allow us to automatically regroup all those different lengths in the same drawings. In configurations, we can easily see if a part has already been designed, so it avoids duplication,” states Beaudry.

Design validation tools

You can use COSMOS products to quickly identify problems in your initial design.

SolidWorks also offers a wide range of design validation tools for evaluating product prototypes, so you can identify and fix problems even before you build your machine. What’s more, you can move components through their full range of motion, automatically identifying clearances and detecting interference.

With the ability to find problems early in the process, you can quickly communicate design intent to your customers, manufacturing, and maintenance. “Being able to verify interference before fabrication is a big timesaver, which allows us to avoid mistakes and trial-and-error,” continues Beaudry. “The SolidWorks interference-checking and animation capabilities give us the ability to better understand the behavior of the machine, allowing us to make sure that the motion will work as designed.”

Today, packaging machinery manufacturers must streamline their design processes to remain competitive, to achieve as few iterations as possible before the production configuration, and to reduce the opportunity for design errors.

Hartness International, Inc. is undertaking an initiative that they call “Value Engineering,” which evaluates complete assemblies or subassemblies to determine ways to perform the same functions at a lower cost.

Hartness International, Inc. is undertaking an initiative that they call “Value Engineering,” which evaluates complete assemblies or subassemblies to determine ways to perform the same functions at a lower cost. “So far, we have been able to cut costs on subassemblies by 50 to 60 percent with the Value Engineering initiative,” says Ron Leblanc, engineering manager at Hartness International, Inc. “All the multiple facets come together to help us increase efficiency and decrease time-to-market. SolidWorks software is instrumental in helping us to achieve these goals.”

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