How To Perform Maintenance For A Coffee Capsule Packing Machine?
It is no doubt that no matter what kind of machine you own, you need to make sure it is well taken care of, especially for large machines like coffee capsule packing machines.
Maintenance can be treated as one kind of risk management that plays an important role in maintaining optimum productivity.
It is so important that some companies have made very detailed and informative maintenance plans for their equipment.
We’ll start with some easy and basic points, and then cover it later in this article about how to make detailed maintenance plans.
Five Tips For Coffee Capsule Packing Machine Maintenance.
- Lubrication
As the first thing you need to consider for machine maintenance, which is also clearly described in the machine manual, it’s very important that those moving parts of the coffee capsule packing machine must be kept regularly lubricated with a drop of lubricant.
And if it’s ignored, the defects caused by friction are usually not covered under warranty.
- Keep the machine clean and dry
If the machine is covered with dust, dirt or some coffee powder, it is unpleasant to use, it may also lead to some potential problems during the running.
Simply do some cleaning at the end of the work will make a lasting impact on preventing big problems later on.
Empty the dust box at the “suction powder” station in time, and clean the heat sealing head everyday.
Regular cleaning can prevent the prolonged downtime associated with less frequent maintenance.
It’s also important that the machine is kept dry.
Remember to dry the machine after the cleaning, and place it in a dry place.
- Keep some parts sharp
The coffee capsule packing machine has components designed to cut, such as the cutter of the “vertical capsule loading” system or “film cut & heat sealing” system.
Keeping the sharpness of them is critical.
Especially the cutter in the “film cut & heat sealing” system, probably stuck to some roll film debris after a period of running, causing the blade to become blunter.
If this is ignored, may lead to cutting film not good or even failure.
It’ll be very effective if you can do the sharpening weekly.
- Change parts regularly
As we all know that wearing parts exists in almost all the machines.
Regular replacement of wearing parts is required to avoid slowing down or complete failure of coffee capsule packing machine.
If this is ignored, when the damaged elements failed the machine’s running and even inhibit the production line, It will be very bad.
Besides the damaged parts could only be detected or replaced by highly qualified and trained person or certified service technicians.
Therefore, at first you take a inventory of high wearing parts and moderate wearing parts, then make clear of the process and schedule for replacing.
You should be in good communication with your supplier about these parts.
- Inspect machine regularly
Regular inspections play an important role in machine maintenance for ensuring your machine’ long life span.
You can make a schedule for these inspections described below:
·Check whether the chain is loose
·Check whether some other parts is loose
·Check for abnormal sound
·Check if the motors are overheating
·Check the sealing quality by random sampling
·Check the weight of the whole capsule by random sampling
Perform these routine inspections to ensure that the machine is in a well condition.
Four Types Of Coffee Capsule Packing Machine Maintenance
All right, let’s dig it deeper.
We’ll go through a group of theoretical knowledge about machine maintenance first, then use this knowledge to improve our maintenance skills and learn how to make a detailed coffee capsule packing machine maintenance schedule.
At first, there are basically four types of maintenance strategies.
- Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance(PM) is based on the philosophy that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.
PM is performed at predetermined intervals or according to prescribed standards, designed to reduce the risk of failure or performance deterioration of equipment.
It helps you find and fix small issues early by scheduling inspections and tasks before they become big problems.
It helps reduce the possibility of unexpected failure or equipment breakdowns.
PM can be as simple as doing a weekly check, a cleaning, a drying, a lubrication, or replacing an element once it has done some number of run-hours just like the tips mentioned above.
- Corrective maintenance
Corrective maintenance(CM) is based on a firm philosophy that, in the event of a failure, downtime and repairs cost less than the investment required for a maintenance program.
Therefore repairs are carried out after an abnormal condition appears, with the purpose of getting back to the normal conditions.
This strategy seems to be cost-effective before a disastrous failure occurs.
But risks and benefits coexist.
- Risk-based maintenance
Risk-based maintenance(RBM) is based on risk and cost analysis, aims to determine the preventive maintenance strategy by seeking the more reasonable cost of all the risks.
Risk analysis is like this.
·Which part could go wrong?
·The possibility of this problem occurs?
·What influence will this problem cause?
Cost analysis is like this.
·Direct cost. Such as routine preventive maintenance cost.
·Indirect cost. Such as organizational, management cost.
·Consequence of failure cost. Such as safety cost, delay of production cost.
- Condition-Based Maintenance
Condition-based maintenance(CBM) is based on the device performance monitoring, and the corrective actions will be taken accordingly.
By detecting important operating equipment parameters, to achieve continuously monitoring of the equipment conditions is every important in CBM.
Maintenance occurs when certain signal shows that equipment is worsening and the probability of failure is increasing.
So in the long run, this strategy can reduce machine failure associated maintenance costs, meanwhile minimize the occurrence of critical failures and optimizing the management of available economic resources.
Advantages and disadvantages of PM
In a word, its advantage is that it avoids as much trouble as possible before it turns to machine failure.
When you perform maintenance in this strategy, you know what the maintenance team will do in a certain day, you have plenty of time to prepare for it.
Because you have already arranged the work in advance, you can easily send the right guy there at the right time, instead of having to call special technicians to deal with it.
Because you can schedule maintenance to avoid peak production periods, you won’t get confused in such critical times.
On the other hand, its disadvantage is the possibility of straying into the over-maintenance misconception that you’re doing more than you need to.
Can good things be eaten too much? In terms of maintenance, it’s possible.
The two big problems are additional waste and increased risk like these below.
If you replace the fan belt on the engine too soon, you’re probably throwing away perfect stock.
And every time you open the control cabinet and have a technician take parts out and put them back after check, there is a risk of accidental damage.
A technician might strip a bolt or drop a metal tool in the distribution box.
Even something like checking the circuit can introduce foreign matter into the machine.
Advantages and disadvantages of CM
In a word, its simple and save time.
CM only plans maintenance for equipment when it breaks down.
There is almost nothing particular to do until a problem occurs.
It usually reduces short-term costs because a lot of the planning and preventive maintenance work were eliminated.
If the equipment had almost no problems, the maintenance cost was about zero.
It’s the best choice when the equipment is not very expensive or important, or when the time and money required to perform PM is much greater than that required to perform CM.
Despite its advantages, CM also has some disadvantages.
Since little preparation is done before the failure occurs, and there is no advance prediction of what the upcoming problem will be, there is a possibility that something unexpected will happen which increased risks.
Unexpected failure may cause disastrous damage to the whole system.
And generally speaking, it may be too late when finally the equipment failure occurred.
Advantages and disadvantages of RBM
In a word, RBM can reduce risks to acceptable levels.
Since almost all the risks have been analyzed in advance, so the equipment owner can take precautions for risks they think they need to avoid based on their own conditions.
For higher level risks, the frequency of PM or CM may be increased, while for those with lower levels of risk, less or no maintenance will be done.
It’ll eliminates work which seems to be low-value, and provides guidance for limited budgets at the same time.
On the other hand, its disadvantages are obvious.
One is that risk identification and analysis processes is the basis so failure in this link will be enlarged.
There may be unrecognized risks involved and risks that are assessed to be too low which will lead to unexpected results.
Therefore the risk identification and analysis processes is emphasized and may take too much time or spend too much budget.
And its difficult to identify and select the right man for risk assessment.
Besides, risk assessment can be based on too subjective standards due to the lack of reliable objective standards and in that case it is quite common to trust an expert’ judgments.
Advantages and disadvantages of CBM
In a word, you can keep the device running and let the sensor work for you when performing CBM.
CBM takes place while the equipment is running, instead of shutting down the device to check, which saving you overall downtime.
You can just perform tasks when you realized you need them, instead of having to schedule as many inspections in advance, which save on overall maintenance costs.
Being able to “see” the condition of equipment without having to turn it off and disassemble parts to check saves you more than just time and effort.
You’ll only need to send a technician up to check if you already know there’s a problem which indicated by a sensor.
It may also protects you from the risk of equipment damage and injury to technicians.
About disadvantages, the first thing is cost.
This includes both the equipment required and the additional training you will need, which will make you know how to set up and calibrate the sensors.
Besides, this strategy’s basis is that you need to choose the right sensors for the equipment at first.
Even with the “right” sensors, you could still be in trouble if the environment is harsh enough to eventually destroy them, or the sensors themselves may also run into a failure.
Maintenance Types Summary
Choosing the right maintenance strategy starts with understanding your options, their long points and weak points.
Run-to-fail tends to have a bad reputation, but it’s the best option for some equipment.
Actually you can use it when something is difficult or impossible to maintain, but cheap to stock, easy to replace elements.
PM helps you find out potential problems early by scheduling inspections or eliminate some risks before they come out through the daily care.
RBM helps to reduce risks to acceptable levels and cares about risk analysis in advance.
CBM relies on sensors and special software to collect data of the equipment, which will be continuously monitored till the readings exceed preset parameters.
So in the end, there is no one-size-fits-all perfect strategy.
There are someone choose run-to-fail, and also someone choose PM.
Rather than considering various strategies in isolation, look at the differences between them to better understand them.
Actually, instead of having to choose the one that suits you best, you should choose the right mix of maintenance strategies for your coffee capsule packing machine.
How This Theoretical Knowledge Helps Us?
Let’s refocus our attention to coffee capsule packing machine maintenance.
In my opinion, you can try to flexibly use the combination of PM, CM, CBM in performing maintenance of this machine.
You can schedule your own coffee capsule packing machine maintenance work like this below.
When the machine was just arrived and started to work, its a new machine, the operation is not familiar to you, it has much uncertainty, in this initial period, all three of them need to be performed in a higher frequency.
Timely cleanup of dust, lubrication, such PM work is essential.
In addition, you need to strengthen the monitoring of the operating results, like filling weight, sealing quality, to achieve the early detection of problems or problem trends, these CBM work is also essential.
This period can be up to one or two months after the machine first started running.
After a period of use, machine performance tends to stabilize, you can appropriately reduce the frequency of some CBM, maintenance strategy can be based on PM plus CM.
PM is still the basis of normal production every day, and you can try run-to-fail strategy in this period.
After the machine has been running for more than five or six years, all the parts have aged more or less and they are not longer performing very well, you need to strengthen PM and CBM, just like the machine was at the beginning.
Some parts may have to be replaced in time to greatly reduce the probability of errors.
In addition, the results of the machine operation can no longer be fully trusted, and more detection is needed to find out errors early.
Summary
You can basically schedule your coffee capsule packing machine maintenance work like the following.
·Initial stage(1 or 2 months since your machine started work)
– Perform PM, CBM at a higher frequency
·Stable running stage(5 or 6 years)
– Perform PM in a normal frequency, plus CM
·End stage
– Perform PM, CBM at a higher frequency
As for the PM schedule, get suggestions from your supplier.
And, keep in mind five tips of PM work.
·Lubrication
·Keep the machine clean and dry
·Keep some parts sharp
·Change parts regularly
·Inspect machine regularly