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

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Zhang, Zhengyang,M. Eng.Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David E. Hardt.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123764

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123764