For the industrial production of a brick filled with mineral wool blocks, the Swabian company Grenzebach Maschinenbau GmbH has developed a plant which carries out the brick filling with mineral wool and can be integrated into existing production lines.
Operation of the production equipment
Mineral wool stacks in commercially available dimensions of approx. 2 000 x 1 000 mm are provided for line feed-in. The mineral wool meets specific requirements regarding density, quality and thickness tolerance. At the beginning of the work process, a fork lift truck loads the stack, which is more than 2 m in height, onto a rotating platform. This platform then rotates through 180° and transports the stack into the feeding area. Here, a gripper frame attached to a gantry unit takes off a single sheet from the stack and puts it onto a table positioned next to it. Here it is exactly aligned and moved through a longitudinal saw by the line gantry. Several saw blades separate the sheet into longitudinal strips. The sheet tolerance can be adjusted by a lateral milling cutter and excessive material is cut and removed. It is sucked off, collected and later re-injected into the sheet production process.
The longitudinal strips are separated crosswise and cut into the required dimensions. For this purpose, a carriage with carrier frame at the gantry transports the mineral wool strips in cycles through a saw that is moving crosswise to the main transport direction. This cross saw can be equipped with several saw blades to achieve a high output.
In the following special conveyor, the mineral wool blocks are set up vertically and are thus brought in the position required for filling them into the bricks. Already here, they are arranged in groups according to the brick dimensions.
Another gantry is equipped with a carriage with stripping fingers and pushes the row of mineral wool blocks from the conveyor into a marshalling and separating station. After separation of the mineral wool blocks, these are pushed through special channels simultaneously into several ready aligned bricks (three to six bricks, depending on the length of the bricks), whereby the lower row of perforations in the brick is filled first. After lifting the pre-channels, the upper rows of perforations are filled.
The bricks themselves are supplied by a chain conveyor from the brick production line, stopped in a holding position and exactly aligned for the filling process.
Structure of the equipment
With a capacity of 800 bricks per hour, 160 mineral wool blocks per minute are filled into the bricks. This specification refers to a brick length of 36.5 cm and twelve perforations to be filled.
The Grenzebach plant has a modular design and offers various concepts for sawing, sorting and filling, so that individual customer requirements can be taken into account. From simple systems with low-level automation and capacity through to high-performance equipment filling up to 1400 bricks per hour and using mineral wool blocks of different dimensions within the same brick, the user will receive solutions exactly matching his specific production needs.
In the brickworks, this equipment can be fully integrated into the overall production process. The filled bricks are returned to the existing production line where they are stacked and finally packed.
The equipment is also available as a “stand-alone” solution, where the filling system is not integrated into the production process.
