Bucket Elevator Handling Nuts and Cereals

Our client is a long-established and major west London supplier of nuts, cereals, pulses and other ‘world’ goods across the UK and Ireland, primarily to manufacturers, wholesalers, supermarkets, and independent shops.

The Task

As many of the products sold are received in bulk consignments there is a need to repack into smaller apportioned pack sizes ranging from multi-packs bags for individuals, to kilogram bags. To achieve this each product is decanted and manually fed onto a vibratory feeder before being elevated up into a multihead weigh station and then discharged into a bagging machine.

To date, the client has been using a simple bucket elevator purchased from Europe some 20 years ago which is now causing considerable downtime due to breakdowns and no longer has aftersales support in the UK. Also, a recent upgrade to both the multihead weigher and bagging line has meant that the bucket elevator can no longer cope with the increased throughput demand.

Gough have been tasked with replacing this unit with a Swinglink bucket elevator of higher throughput and superior system function and control feedback. The elevator would also be required to accommodate their existing infeed vibratory feeder which would entail redesigning the feeder support structure as well as repositioning it for better operator access and ease of product loading.

The Result

With the Gough Swinglink bucket elevator, the customer can now ramp up production throughput to match the downstream process and increase production output and therefore customer demand. The need to also monitor the bucket elevators system speed and function has now also been made available within the control system supplied.