Triangle Package Machinery Co. has designed and built machinery and equipment since 1923 to help food, industrial, medical, electronics, and other industries meet their demanding packaging requirements. The Chicago-based company's Triangle/Flex Cell machine is at the heart of that help. The machine is designed to meet demands for a compact, space-efficient bag-in-box cartoner that can run 90 to 100 cartons per minute.

Previously, to achieve that kind of packaging speed, large continuous motion cartoners were necessary. But those large machines were expensive to build and complex to configure, and they consumed an excessive amount of valuable floor space. That's why the company came up with the design for its new packaging machine.

But producing the machine required some help, and the company turned to Rockwell Automation and its integrated architecture automation and control solutions. By tightly integrating motion and sequential control into a unified hardware and software environment, the Rockwell Automation architecture helped Triangle reduce engineering costs, boost machine performance, and reduce time-to-market.

The integrate architecture features a common control, communication, and visualization platform that cuts programming time and reduces operator training costs.

Traditional cartoners are mechanically driven machines with a main drive shaft, multiple gearboxes, and numerous timing chains. The integrated architecture design, which includes Rockwell Automation's Kinetix Integrated Motion solution featuring an Allen-Bradley ControlLogix controller as well as Ultra 3000 digital servo drives and MP-Series servo motors, gives Triangle an alternative mechanical drive source that not only fits into a small space but also accommodates fast product changeovers. In fact, the machines vertical design requires a mere 50 square feet of space instead of the 240 square feet needed for traditional motion cartoners. Changeovers can be made in 10 to 20 minutes rather than 2 to 4 hours.

"In previous designs, we would have been required to program every device sequentially rather than simultaneously, increasing our engineering costs and hurting our time-to-market," says Steve Bergholt, chief electronics engineer at Triangle. "The tag-based programming environment [of the integrated architecture] allows programmers to work in parallel on the electrical design and application code. These same programming benefits help us make rapid programming alterations to accommodate customer requests and get a machine to market in three months instead of six, saving thousands of dollars in engineering costs."

In addition to reducing the design cycle and its associate costs, the more flexible architecture helps Triangle take and deliver orders faster than its competition.

"A large part of our success is a commitment to using flexible, off-the-shelf automation technology that performs like custom equipment designed for our customer's unique applications," Bergholt says. "With reduced space requirements, lower maintenance costs, and faster delivery, our customers will quickly appreciate the new cartoner and the technology on which it is based."

That also means manufacturers will get their packaging equipment faster so consumers get their products quicker.

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