Ishida designer awarded for multihead weigher

Toshiharu Kageyama, a mechanical engineer with Ishida Research and Development in Japan, invented an oval-shaped, 18-head multihead weigher that has resulted in him winning the 62nd Kyoto Inventors Award.

“I am honoured to receive this historical award; it is a great pleasure that the product created from my ideas are satisfying customer’s needs throughout the world,” he said.

Ishida said it was imperative to develop a new multihead weigher capable of high-speed weighing while maintaining high accuracy. High-speed vertical form fill seal (VFFS) packaging machines grew in demand around 10 years ago in response to the industry’s need for improved productivity. For high-speed accurate weighing to effectively support high-speed bagmaking, product had to be evenly and consistently fed to all weigh hoppers. If product feeding to each hopper was inadequate, high-speed bagmaking became impossible because of a lack of available combination heads.

Kageyama devised a method to rotate the approach route of product to hoppers using vibration, allowing product feeding to areas that were difficult to feed. Ishida developed its Back to Back feeder that distributes products equally to two weighing inlet chutes from a single supply conveyor, as well as the oval-shaped multihead weigher that allows an optimum discharge route to twin VFFS packaging machines. These three elements enable high-speed weighing of up to 280 weighments per minute, and the company said this technology helps provide footprint and cost savings as one oval-shaped weigher does the job of two weighers.

These technologies are patented in Japan, and more than 350 units are installed in packaging lines for snacks, biscuits and vegetables factories worldwide.

Kageyama also helped develop the Atlas VFFS bagmaker and is now involved in developing the next-generation Ishida multihead weigher. Technology for a new weigher solution includes utilisation of artificial intelligence (AI) and will lead to accurate feeding control, further reduction in product give-away and improved production efficiency.