What Is a Palletizer?
A palletizer is a machine used to arrange products on pallets for shipping and storage.
Products manufactured for commercial use in factories are either stored in-house or shipped to customers. Storing large quantities of products efficiently in a limited space often involves stacking them vertically. However, manual stacking is labor-intensive and time-consuming, requiring items to be removed from the top to access those at the bottom.
Palletizers solve this problem by enabling the vertical stacking of products in smaller units, facilitating efficient logistics.
Uses of Palletizers
Palletizers are employed to load various types of cargo onto pallets. Common examples include corrugated cardboard boxes filled with various products, as well as bags of fertilizers, flour, one-ton cans, cylindrical cans, and items of various shapes and sizes.
For production lines that manufacture large quantities of a single product type, simple mechanical palletizers are utilized due to their high-speed capabilities. In contrast, for lines producing small quantities of diverse products, robotic palletizers are favored for their ability to stack items of various shapes.
Features of Palletizers
Different types of palletizers exhibit distinct features and mechanisms.
Mechanical palletizers, as mentioned earlier, excel at stacking a limited variety of products at high speeds. These machines repetitively perform the same operation, resulting in neatly arranged pallets even at high speeds. However, their layout flexibility is inferior compared to robotic palletizers. To minimize arm mobility while maintaining safety, mechanical palletizers often employ crank arms. These arms come in two main types: the suction type and the low-floor drop-in type. The suction type palletizes products by gripping them at one or two points, while low-floor drop-in type palletizers can load products without the risk of them falling.
On the other hand, robotic palletizers, as previously mentioned, can be programmed to stack items based on their shape. While arm movements are restricted through programming, similar to human range of motion, they are confined to fixed paths. In many cases, safety fencing is installed around the robotic arm to ensure safe operation even if the arm moves outside the designated area.