Big Bag reconditioner

Big bags make it possible to buy very large quantities of product and to obtain lower prices from sellers.

Because of their size, when they come from far away, they almost always travel in containers by ship.
For some substances, such as paint additives or sugar, the long months of transport can lead to the big bags becoming compacted.
The material inside them thickens and becomes so cohesive that it forms a single monolithic block that is very difficult to handle and, in fact, prevents the product from being extracted.

If you find yourself in the position of having to disintegrate these bags in order to use their contents in a fluid way and you don’t know how to do it, you are in the right place.
Apply has developed a big bag reconditioner, an industrial machine that massages them in depth on all four sides and throughout their height.

All the work is done by two crushing plates, each driven horizontally by a pair of pneumatically controlled hydraulic pistons.
If the plates are the hands, the heart of the machine is a hydraulic pump and the brain is the PLC controller, capable of defining and memorising the massage sequence in all its variations (piston stroke, frequency, position, speed, side and height), without ever breaking the bag.
Finally, the legs, the pallet wheel that enables the massage action on all four sides.
The system is anchored to its skeleton, a self-supporting rigid closed frame, inside which all the reactions of the high stresses generated during compression are discharged.
The reconditioner is also equipped with protection against the risk of the operator being crushed by means of light barriers.

One of the advantages of the reconditioner is that it takes up very little space, both in terms of floor space and height.
This, together with the fact that the big bag can be loaded onto the pallet wheel using either a forklift truck or a pallet truck, means that the installation can also be carried out in cramped and elevated areas.
The reconditioning cycles, known as recipes, can be carried out either manually or automatically and are programmable and memorisable via touch panel.
Defining, saving and recalling the massage recipes, depending on the bag to be treated, means a considerable reduction in downtime and the possibility of reconditioning even big bags that are almost completely full.

Technical features:
– Oversized hydraulic pump
– Automation achieved thanks to the Siemens S7-1200 PLC
– Frame verified with finite element method (FEM analysis)
– Painted carbon steel execution
– 4 safety light curtains monitored by control unit, protection degree SIL 2 (EN 62061) cat. 3 PLd (EN ISO 13849-1)