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Ensure Series Production，Drive Energy Efficiency

One-Stop Empowerment for Predictive Maintenance and Energy Optimization of Packaging, Sorting, Labeling, and Forming Equipment

A globally renowned food company uses a packaging machine on its milk powder production line for final packaging. This packaging machine precisely controls the opening and closing of lids via 16 cylinders to ensure the correct number of bags in each milk powder package. Stable operation of these cylinders is critical to ensuring packaging accuracy and production efficiency.

Key Pain Points:

  • Cylinders may suffer damage or air leakage after long-term high-frequency operation, causing:
    – Inaccurate packaging quantity (overfill or underfill)
    – Large amounts of defective products requiring rework
    – Production interruptions and material waste
  • Traditional maintenance methods cannot predict faults in advance and only perform repairs after failures occur, resulting in unguaranteed production line OEE.

Festo AX Solution:

  • Platform Deployment: Seamlessly integrates the Festo AX system into the company’s global cloud platform.
  • Application Empowerment: Uses MIP (Motion Insights Pneumatic) to monitor and analyze the real-time operating status of the 16 cylinders.
  • Global Sharing: Analysis results and data are shared in real time across global subsidiaries’ platforms, facilitating unified viewing and management by global teams.

Highlights and Achievements:

  • Accurate Early Warnings: The system successfully issued 3 alarms during operation, indicating abnormalities in specific cylinders.
  • Verified Effectiveness: Returned the alerted cylinders to the lab for inspection, fully validating the AX system’s predictions:
    – 1 cylinder was damaged
    – 2 cylinders had air leakage problems
  • Demonstrated Value: Early warnings prevented large-scale rework and production stoppages caused by packaging errors, proving the great value of predictive maintenance.
  • Efficient Standardization: Adopted the ready-to-use MIP standard app, greatly reducing deployment difficulty and time, enabling rapid empowerment.
  • Global Collaboration: Cloud-based architecture enables global sharing and collaborative management of monitoring results, doubling management efficiency.

Festo AX leverages intelligent machine data analysis to provide a full-process predictive solution that ensures safe, controllable, and maximized production efficiency while guaranteeing clean production and zero-defect quality.

We offer diversified solutions for predictive maintenance, quality assessment, and energy optimization for key food packaging processes including:

  • Vertical packaging machines: Using Festo AX MIP to monitor horizontal sealing and cutting cylinders, preventing poor sealing or leaks
  • Palletizers: Monitoring grippers, lifting, rotating cylinders, and vacuum generators to avoid dropping and misaligned stacking
  • Forming, filling, and cartoning machines: Preventing blockages or material shortages before they occur
  • Cigar machines: Monitoring key pneumatic actuators to avoid jamming and unexpected line stoppages
  • Labeling machines: Combined with Festo MSE6-C2M energy-saving air supply units to continuously monitor pressure and air consumption, identifying optimal pressure levels and detecting leaks

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