Servo presses cut downtime and waste at Millipore

A range of custom-built servo presses, designed and manufactured by Schmidt Technology, are helping Millipore cut downtime on its membrane filter cutting lines at its facility in Ireland.

In addition, the presses are enabling the company to minimise scrap materials by optimising the number of elements produced from each roll of filter media, with the combined result that machine payback for several of the presses has been achieved in around nine months.

Millipore develops and produces products and services for the bioscience research and biopharmaceutical manufacturing sectors.

Among Millipore's core products are specialised filtration equipment and filter media for use in applications ranging from the production of purified water in laboratories, to cell culture and analysis.

Many of the filter components are produced at the company's plant in Ireland.

Vincent Smith, senior project engineer, said: 'We manufacture both membrane filter media and complete filter units for use in critical blood diagnostics and laboratory procedures by our customers around the world.

'In recent years we have invested heavily in our manufacturing facilities in Ireland and, wherever possible, have automated each aspect of the production process, with the goal of minimising our costs while increasing productivity, quality and the level of service to our customers,' he added.

A key part of the automation programme has been the installation of eight servo presses for cutting individual filter discs from rolls of specialised media.

The presses have been installed over several years as production requirements have increased, and have to provide extremely high levels of accuracy and repeatability, to within +/-0.1mm, and handle a variety of media measuring between 150mm and 320mm in width.

The first automatic machine from Schmidt Technology was installed about five years ago and replaced an existing multi-stage press tool.

'This had an immediate impact on productivity,' said Smith.

'Perhaps as importantly, the reliability of the system has been excellent as the machine is still operating today having completed more than 40 million cycles with no downtime apart from routine maintenance,' he added.

More recently, Schmidt Technology has installed several presses that are integrated with robot handling systems, enabling Millipore to shorten production times and make significant reductions in scrap material.

Although the standard range of Schmidt servo presses are designed as modular systems to be easy to setup and use, the production requirements at Millipore required Schmidt to carry out considerable development and engineering work at its customer support centre in the UK.

This work included the design of dedicated tooling, plus robotic loading and unloading stations, and machine safety and guarding systems.

In addition, Schmidt UK provided programming expertise for the dedicated press controls, which provide a simple yet advanced operator interface for sophisticated monitoring, control and analysis functions, with the ability to be linked directly to higher level plant management networks.

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