Vertical Form-Fill-Seal Machine

Overview

A vertical form-fill-seal machine makes a bag, fills it, and seals it in one downward cycle, taking flat printed film off a roll at the top and dropping finished bags off the bottom. It is the workhorse of snack, coffee, frozen-food, and hardware packaging because forming the bag at the moment of filling needs no pre-made bags and runs at high rate from a compact footprint. Film comes in through the Vertical Form-Fill-Seal Machine's Film Unwind, wraps into a tube at the Forming Collar & Tube, and is sealed by the vertical and horizontal sealers around a charge of product from the Dosing System.

The cycle is intermittent: the film stops for the cross-seal and cut, then indexes down exactly one bag length, so seal time and pull length set the achievable rate.

How it works

The Forming Collar & Tube folds the flat web around the fill tube into a vertical tube with its edges overlapped. The Vertical Sealer welds that overlap into a continuous back seam, and the twin Film Transport vacuum belts grip the tube and draw it down one bag length each cycle. With the tube held, the Dosing System drops a measured charge, an auger meters powders, a multihead weigher drops a weighed charge of granules, straight through the fill tube into the bag.

The Horizontal Jaw Sealer then closes its heated jaws across the tube, sealing the top of the filled bag and the bottom of the next bag in one bite, while a knife between the jaws cuts the finished bag free. A Date/Batch Coder marks the lot and best-before code onto the film upstream. The Control System coordinates film pull, dosing, seal temperature, and cutting into one timed cycle and runs the recipe through the touchscreen.