After installing Gough equipment into their facilities in the UK, a leading international confectionery manufacturer got in touch to develop a fully integrated conveying and feeding system for their production facility in Nigeria.
The main challenge was that the facility was already highly congested with a number of well-established production lines, and moving them would have incurred huge costs in lost production.
The system was needed to connect the area of the facility where bulk loads of wrapped sweets were delivered, to their various pieces of packaging equipment and machinery.
The final system, developed by engineers working in the UK and Nigeria, consisted of Swinglink bucket elevators, vibratory feeders, belt conveyors and a storeveyor, all managed by an integrated control system.
The wrapped sweets and confectionery were loaded into the travelling buckets at several different inlets before travelling through a vertical and horizontal network and discharging at one of the pneumatically selective bucket tipping locations.
The storeveyor was deployed to allow the wrapped sweets to be buffered within the system for up to 20 minutes at a time, allowing for temporary halts of the multihead weighers and bagging equipment.
To enable the regular cleaning processes and to ensure longevity the entire structure was manufactured from stainless steel.
The final system meant the company was able to successfully process 1.6 tonnes per hour of confectionery running operations 24 hours a day, increasing their ability to supply emerging African markets without the need to move processing to a larger facility.