The German company Teepack, a sister company of Teekanne, has developed and produced machines for the production of beverage tea bags for 60 years. With its new “Perfecta” machine and a new tubular bag machine, the company counts on automation from Bosch Rexroth.
A misconceived direct mailing in 1908 marked the beginning of a new way to package tea. In order to keep shipping costs low, tea dealer Thomas Sullivan sent small tea samples to potential customers in New York in light silk bags instead of the customary tin cans. The recipients who had no experience with the preparation of tea immersed the precious leaves in hot water together with the silk bag and thus involuntarily invented the tea bag.
In 1929, a predecessor company of the Teekanne/Teepack group in Dresden, Germany, developed a fully automatic machine and invented taste-neutral materials to contain the tea leaves. After the reorganization of the company in 1948, Teepack developed a new style of tea bag, which is still typically used with premium teas today. The company also developed a fully automatic machine for the production of these bags.
Teekanne, the market leader for tea in Germany today, fills 10 million tea and herb bags every day on Teepack machines. Since its foundation, Teepack has installed about 2,500 filling machines worldwide. A variety of tea products and different flavors and packages has decisively increased on supermarket shelves. Thus, flexibility in production is more important than ever.
Rexroth controls 400 bags per minute
Teepack fulfills this production flexibility with its current machine, Perfecta. It consists of a basic machine with optional modules that can be added to fasten the thread to the bag and the label with knots, or tack them together with a metal clamp. The modules also can pack the individual bags in aroma-proof paper envelops or heat-sealable foil depending on the requirements. Teepack includes the modules in the machine with the Bosch Rexroth automation concept IndraMotion for Packaging with decentralized control and servo technology. With this automation concept, the Perfecta consistently keeps a cycle time of 0.15 seconds, or 400 bags per minute.
All of the recipes, procedural processes, visualization and a PLC according to IEC 61131-3 standards, are saved on an industrial PC by Teepack.
Rexroth IndraMotion for Packaging with the drive-based IndraMotion MLD ensures the decentralized synchronization of the servo drives for the individual modules. It controls up to eight servo axes in real time via SERCOS III without any necessary additional hardware. The open control is based on IndraLogic, a run time system which also corresponds to IEC 61131-3.
Numerous functionalities that are common in packaging machines are already pre-configured in the control by Rexroth via the PLCopen motion modules.
“Thanks to the modular concept of the Perfecta and the modular automation structure, we can always provide the ideal machine to our customers,” says Andreas Meyering, head of electric engineering and software development with Teepack.