Design and development of an automated sorting and orienting machine for vials

Abstract

Hand sorting is an inefficient and unreliable process for packaging identical parts in large quantities. Because of the capacity limitation, this process is currently the bottleneck of a new vial production line at Waters Corporation. Therefore, Waters is implementing an automated sorting and packaging system to replace its existing manual process. The design presented in this thesis is a sub-system of the proposed solution and automates the process of sorting and orienting loose state vials. It is the first stage of the proposed solution and facilitates later actions that load vials into trays. The sorting machine accepts loose bulk of vials and continuously outputs a stream of vials that are oriented in the same direction. A small-scale prototype shows the feasibility of using mechanical selectors to accurately orient vials with a high throughput. The final full-scale design lays out the setup of the entire machine.