Development of a new lifting device for Tetra Pak R1

Sammanfattning: This report describes the development and design of a new concept for a lifting device in Tetra Pak’s R1 filling line. It is important that the problems and challenges with the current design, the Tetra Pak R1 Elevator, is fathomed to get a better understanding of what was aimed to achieve in this thesis and why. The purpose of the Tetra Pak R1 filling line is to automatically fold, fill and seal cartons of food with the package type Tetra Recart® Midi. The packages are moved through the different production steps inside specially designed carriers, before the final folding the packages must be removed from said carriers; it’s the Elevators job to separate them and place the packages on the following part of the production line. The current Elevator, although working properly, suffers from several faults and annoyances. It does its job and it does it well; the major issues are not in regard towards its functions, the problems are related towards reconfigurations between volumes, manufacturing costs, weight of the machine and complex assemblies to mention a few. It is these problems the new concept will have to address. In this thesis, all the important steps in the development process from mission brief to final concept is described. As a framework, Ulrich and Eppinger’s Product Design and Development was used. Information was gathered internally through interviews, focus groups, documents, manuals and hands on experience with the machine. While inspiration for the concept generation was accomplished with both internal and external searches. Due to the size and complexity of the project, the problems were decomposed into smaller sub-problems, the solutions for those were later combined, studied and adapted to find solutions for the overall concepts. The most promising concepts were further developed, ranked and screened until one final concept remained. In the end, a final concept was designed that proved to be an improvement in nearly every regard compared to the current Elevator. Implementation of this concept might prove very beneficial for both Tetra Pak and their customers.