The world’s largest explosives manufacturing company, located in Montreal Canada, had up to 20 people on an assembly line hand filling a granule explosive into cloth bags.  They came to ActionPac to engineer the weighing solution necessary to render obsolete the human resources and most importantly the human risk this endeavor was creating for their operation.

ActionPac designed and manufactured an ME109CLX6 to solve the precarious dilemma this munitions business was dealing with.  This is a complex system, built with redundant safety features, comprised of six lanes for dumping the granules into two check weighers.  These check weighers communicate with the entire system through an RS232 output to a computer screen for a visual read.

“The biggest challenge with engineering this project was due to lack of product for testing.  Obviously we couldn’t do sample runs with the actual explosive so we used rice grains.  The customer suggested this substitute but it didn’t simulate the actual product very well.  Some major engineering had to be done on installation at the customer’s site to complete this project”, said Roberto Santos, ActionPac’s assembly manager.

Other challenges with this project included the integration of the customer’s engineered and self manufactured packing machinery and the systems diverse array of features.  These features include air driven feeders, buckets and reject mechanisms; conformance to a CLASS II DIV I GRP F & G hazardous materials environment; hermetically sealed load cells; a custom pneumatic drive; pressurized controls, wiring and conduit; socketed circuit boards and components for ease of repair; and air piloted solenoids.

Very successful for both ActionPac and the munitions manufacturer this linear ME109CLX6 system has been safely put into use. It features precision weigh and fills of less than 500g of various volatile pellets at the rate of 60 cycles per minute with 2 required dumps. Operated by one full time machine manager who sits in a “safe” room with the computer screen, he only needs to enter the “hazardous” area intermittently when the system is on pause.