When Atlas Vac Machine customers discuss problems and ideas, our engineers listen. The results are tray sealers with the features sought by users looking for innovative processes. As is often the case, tray sealer recipes can be preprogrammed for multiple products and therefore require tooling changeovers set up to a different validated recipe. Simple as this may seem, customer specific logistics impact these changeovers.

In some changeovers, the operator cannot complete the setup without a supervisor using the password to select the correct protected recipe. In other cases, a busy technician is the only person authorized to swap out tooling and able to verify the selected recipe is correct for the product to be run. Additional scenarios require the tool, its position and the recipe to be checked on every stroke of the sealer.

Atlas Vac Machine customers have worked through these issues with our engineers to provide a reasonable and creative solution. Tooling is now capable of identifying itself to the tray sealer through our RFID Tool Recognition System and therefore providing a precise match to the recipe in the PLC memory. Additionally, duplicate tools for the same product but with slight run variations in time, temperature or pressure parameters between different sealers can pull up their unique validated versions of the same recipe…both previously validated to the tool and machine. With the simple drop in place tooling using the RFID Tool Recognition System, operators implement changeovers without manually setting recipe parameters or accessing password protected program details. Mistake free, quick and validated tray sealer process changeovers made easy.