Brb Globus has been using Ever Elettronica drives and stepper motors for its labeling machines for ten years, which have thus achieved flexibility and precision.
Specializing in the design and manufacture of automatic labeling machines, Brb Globus began operations in Porto Mantovano, in the province of Mantua, back in 1984 - with only five employees. Today it has grown to thirty people who, distributed among the design office, purchasing office, accounting and assembly department, work in the company committed to customer satisfaction.
Here is how the story of Alessandro Marchini, head of the foreign sales office, begins. "Brb Globus is an ever-growing company whose greatest commitment is to transform customer needs into customized machines destined for different markets. In Brb we work on job orders, and the most important market for us is the foreign one," Marchini says. " Enough to think that 85 percent of the labeling machines produced are exported abroad, while the remaining 15 percent are destined for the Italian market. Our strengths are custom design and a focus on innovation."
"In the company we are very aware of technological changes and, following the trends dictated by the market, we have always used technically and technologically advanced and reliable components," Marchini continues. "And it is precisely with a view to continuous renewal that the collaboration between Brb Globus and Ever Elettronica began ten years ago. We started to consider Ever Elettronica a technologically interesting company when, in 2005, it decided to integrate drivers into the motor body. From that moment on, the relationship became concrete and Ever Elettronica became our drive supplier."
The Mantua-based company's core business is rotary labeling machines for sectors such as cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, as well as wine, mineral water, beer, juices, milk and beverages in general. The labeling machines signed Brb Globus are capable of labeling any type of packaging, from the simplest to those with the most peculiar lines.
"Every issue is carefully studied before it is solved," Marchini continues. "This careful analysis, combined with the flexibility of Brb Globus machinery, allows us to work smoothly with different brands. In the company, we take care of the whole process: from design, wiring, and machine panel to assembly."
The control of rotary labeling machines for applying one or more labels to bottles or containers of different shapes and sizes at high speed and with high label positioning accuracy, even with abrupt changes in product speed, is possible at low cost thanks to Ever Elettronica's control technologies and high-pole-count synchronous brushless motors - more commonly known as stepper motors.
In fact, the Lodi-based company's rotary labeling machine control solution enables the management of up to four labeling heads and the orientation of the plates (up to 32 units) in electronic cam with the carousel, making it possible to precisely position the label on the product. The bottle rotation platens in the application are driven by high-pole-count AC synchronous motors that, controlled with advanced "full digital" electronics in sensorless or closed-loop mode via incremental optical or absolute incremental magnetic encoder, also optimizing label management on the rotary machines by dynamically synchronizing the speed of emission with the speed of sliding of the product to be labeled.
"Among the advantages offered by stepper motors is that they can be used in direct drive on the application without the need for speed reducers," Marchini continues.
Stepper motors, in addition to being more cost-effective from the standpoint of torque delivery, also provide more accurate positioning, the absence of the pendulum motions typical of low-pole-count brushless drives, greater stability, less vibration and long service life. The labeling process is done in three different ways: cold glue, hot glue and self-adhesive.
"One of the most frequent requests from customers was to have both glue and self-adhesive labeling on the same machine. It was precisely this request that gave rise to a compact labeling machine that has all types of labeling. In a nutshell, these are trolleys that dock as needed," Marchini illustrates. "The customer, depending on the product to be labeled, is free to choose whether to apply self-adhesive labels or glue paper, and the format change is immediate and simple." A further example, the latter, of how all machines coming out of Brb Globus workshops are the answer to a precise need.
"But our attention to the customer does not stop there. Our machines, which are present all over the world, are monitored thanks to a careful after-sales service that ensures maximum reliability, even though it is our practice, during testing, to always carry out all the necessary tests so as to make sure that all the components are working properly and so that we do not have to intervene later," Marchini concludes.