Pharma carton printing on display at Total

Edited by the Processingtalk editorial team Mar 5, 2007

See the Sunala Pharmacarton Coding Station, designed for in-line high resolution printing of lot, expiry and bar codes for pharmaceutical and medical cartons at Total Processing and Packaging 2007

At Total Processing and Packaging 2007, Sunala will preview a new advanced version of the market leading Wolke m600 thermal transfer ink jet printer and demonstrate the latest version of its successful Pharmacarton Coding Station, designed for in-line high resolution printing of lot, expiry and bar codes for pharmaceutical and medical cartons.

The Pharmacarton II has been designed around the Animal Health requirement of mass-serialisation using Datamatrix codes and the proposed future changes to European pharmaceutical traceability requirements.

The new model resolves the issue of printing high density bar codes and 2D codes in-line by totally controlling the carton during the print and vision process.

Codes are printed using the Wolke m600 Advanced thermal inkjet printer and then verified by a SEA Vision OCV character verification system.

In addition, the unit comprises a carton conveyor, stabilising belts and a reject unit to remove sub-standard packs immediately and help maintain line speeds.

The Pharmacarton II can be easily integrated into existing packaging lines, requiring minimum space, and is fully adjustable to suit a range of carton sizes.

A major feature of the new Wolke m600 Advanced is its ability to print in real-time, again to suit the latest Animal Health requirements, accepting data from a remote server through the built - in Ethernet port.

As with the original model, the user-friendly printer uses advanced HP technology and water-based inks to deliver clean and maintenance-free coding onto a wide range of substrates, producing characters and bar codes up to 600 dpi.

In addition, the Sunala stand will also feature a new high-speed print traversing unit for coding on pharmaceutical blister lines using newly developed inks suitable for aluminium foil, the Travtec TR-750 Speed-Feeder, which provides high speed feeding of flat cartons and blister cards for labelling, print and apply labelling and inkjet printing, and the Collamat modular label applicator from Switzerland, which combines reliability with easy handling.