An important French company, leader in the market of flexible tubes for cosmetics, has recently ordered the production of a MOSS printing line for the decoration of its products.
The fully automatic line is composed by a multipurpose machine MP-8 for gloss or matt varnish of tubes, connected through an accumulator to a fully servo-assisted silk-screen machine model MS-1070 for tube decoration and capping.
The productivity of the line is of 80 pcs/min for tubes whose diameter is from 19mm to a maximum of 50mm, for a total of 13 different tube formats and with 24 different cap formats (screw-on and push-on) to be applied onto them. The high flexibility of the line played a fundamental role, beyond the high-quality construction level, in the choice of Moss by the French manufacturer.
The MP-8 machine is located at the beginning of the line, after a fully automatic feeding system of tubes, and it is equipped with a flexographic varnishing device whose automatic pumping system guarantees the feed and viscosity stability of varnish. The same machine includes a cleaning system for the tube surface and a flame treatment group with electronic control. After the application of the varnish layer, automatic pliers pull the tubes out from the machine and place them on a pin-chain conveying system that carries them to an UV drying oven. From the oven, the tubes proceed on the pin chain, passing through a vertical buffering accumulator that brings them to the silk-screen machine.
This machine encloses different exclusive technologies. In fact, the high constructive flexibility of MS 1070 permits to house, on the 20-station configuration chosen by the French customer, 5 completely servo-assisted and remotely adjustable silk-screen modules and two different capping systems. One to assembly “flip-top” push-on caps with accurate positioning of the opening with reference to the main decoration; the second one to assembly “screw-on” caps with torque control. In its 20-station configuration, this MS-1070 is equipped with a camera for X – Y tube pre-positioning before print, UV-LED lamps, mercury-vapor UV lamps for ink-drying and spot-UV for 360° overlapping flawless decoration. This machine includes also a print quality control system.
The control system of the line is by 4.0 B&R systems, today available on the entire Moss range. This architecture allows for connecting the machine with the customer’s factory for fast production’s data exchange and for remote access by Moss engineers. Moss Smart Assistant app interfaces with every MOSS machine to provide real time production’s data and service notifications directly on a smartphone display. MOSS Smart Assistant app is now available on iOS and Android operating systems.