Next-gen palletizing

A history of innovation at the service of packaging

Lancia S.R.L. is a company founded in 1990 in the Modena area. Thanks to a long and proven experience in the design and manufacture of packaging machinery, the company is now a reference for the supply of palletizing systems, case packers, carton formers and shrink wrappers.
Lancia's solutions find their way into numerous plants of prestigious companies nationally and internationally, particularly in sectors such as food, pharmaceutical, chemical and adhesive tape production.

Since the beginning of its activity, Lancia has invested considerable resources in research aimed at creating original and highly innovative solutions for industrial automation, especially related to end-of-line Packaging systems. Solutions that are characterized by their quality and reliability, combined with high productivity, speed of cycle execution, flexibility of use, small overall dimensions and ease of installation.

The challenge: to increase productivity by 40 percent

Lancia recently received a particularly challenging assignment from one of its customers, the food company Menù of Medolla. In fact, to support the operations of its high-intensity production lines, Menù needed an ultrafast palletizer. The request was for a machine capable of operating on 1600 mm pallets reaching 20 cycles per minute, instead of the traditional 12-14. A productivity increase in the order of about 40 percent parts/minute that Lancia addressed by developing a newly designed machine. Thus was born the MICRORACK BS10 MAN palletizer, equipped with the latest technologies on the market and capable of ensuring high productivity in an efficient and safe manner.

Special attention was paid to the selection and setup of dedicated motion solutions, the performance of which was critical to achieving the goal. "We were already using Yaskawa solutions for motion control, and for this order we chose to test the brand new Sigma-X and iCube Control series," comments Francesco Lancia, owner of the company.

Motion control evolution

In particular, Sigma X attracted Lancia's attention for its ability to adequately meet the stringent requirements identified by the company in terms of performance, precision, dynamics and reliability. With real-time data collection, speeds up to 7000 RPM, a frequency of 3.5 kHz, and multi-axis amplifiers with advanced features to increase accuracy, Sigma-X is a key step in taking Yaskawa servo systems to a new level of performance-and ideal for delivering the performance required by the new machine.

"Sigma-X's contribution has been crucial, but the real quantum leap has been made possible by integrating control, motion, and secure remote access to the machine into a single harmonized architecture. It's not just about accelerating, it's about doing it intelligently, maintaining consistent synchronization, stability and precision even at the highest operating speeds," Lancia tells us. That's where the innovative iCube Control platform comes in.

With the ability to integrate motion management, communication, and logic into a single platform, iCube Control played a crucial role in ensuring that the responsiveness of the system was not only preserved but even enhanced. This unified architecture enables efficient coordination of all machine functions, minimizing communication delays between different components and improving operational synergy.

Efficiency squared: productive and energy

Each step in the process is handled with superior accuracy and speed, benefiting overall performance, both in terms of efficiency and the quality of the end result. The result is a system capable of working extremely fast, with cycle times as low as 70 microseconds.

But that's not all: MICRORACK BS10 MAN turned out to be a machine capable of maintaining maximum efficiency even on continuous cycles, with particularly interesting results in terms of efficiency: at an industry-standard cycle rate of 10 cycles/min, the system draws just 1 kW, while at full power, i.e., at 20 cycles/minute, it still remains in the range of 3 KW.

A result that opens up new perspectives

A key contribution to the success of the project came from the technical support of Yaskawa, which assisted the Lancia team in the setup and optimization phases. "As much as the Sigma-X and iCube Control products are designed for simple and intuitive setup, these are state-of-the-art technologies that we were experimenting with for the first time. We had yet to probe their full potential," explains Lancia. "Being able to count on a competent and present partner proved decisive in order to integrate the new solutions in the best possible way and take full advantage of their benefits."

In this way, the goal initially perceived as particularly challenging has been smoothly achieved: high performance, consistent precision and optimal dynamics. "The speed with which we achieved this goal prompts us to believe that we can go even further," Lancia comments on the matter, already envisioning further future developments.