Product Troughs

Product troughs are stainless steel pans with integral “doctoring” screens. The pans hold the bulk powder during the manual filling operation. The built-in screens provide convenient means for “doctoring-off” any excess powder that normally tends to accumulate at the tip of the filling gun during the “picking” process. To attain good repeat accuracy of successive fills, it is important to eliminate this excess powder so that that the volume of powder in the chamber is constant from dose to dose.

Conventional Filling Guns

Conventional filling guns are the most common instruments used to manually pick and deliver precise doses of dry, powdered, or granular products. They are classified in three size ranges… “Standard”, “Micro” and “Nano”.

Fixed Volume Guns

Fixed volume guns are guns which operate as conventional, “vacuum pick-Up/pressure release” instruments. However, as their name connotes, their chamber volumes are calibrated to exact fixed values and cannot be adjusted. They are particularly useful wherever the end-product is being sold in volumetric units such as c.c.s rather than by weight, and variations in product density is of no consequence. This is highly typical in the human tissue industry.

Plunge Guns

Earlier we spoke of “conventional” guns as those instruments which allowed product to be “picked’ by vacuum and dosed by a puff of low pressure air. However, there are instances where a product cannot be dosed strictly by air pressure or where the required volume of delivered product is very close to the available volume of the receiving vessel. Sometimes in such cases we can effectively fill product by mechanically sweeping or plunging the dose from the gun chamber mechanically by the action of an integral pneumatic cylinder. The guns themselves incorporate pairs of flow control valves to allow speed regulation of the “extend” and “retract” strokes of the cylinder. The “extend” stroke moves the chamber plunger to the very end of the chamber. The retract stroke is variable and is limited by the stroke adjustment screw at the top end of the cylinder.

Multi-Gun and Plunge Gun Manifolds

Vibratory Feeders & Pedestal-Mounted Funnels

Gun Filters

The material of choice for almost all filling guns is a woven 316 S.S. mesh. However, woven nylon mesh is sometimes used as an alternate material. Standard micron grades for standard size guns are 1, 5, 10, 20 and 40 microns. Sub-micron grades of 0.5 and 0.2 micron are available in sintered 316 S.S. for some selected guns.

The term “gun filter” is also used to include the “chamber filters” that are inside the shuttle disks of the automatic & semi-automatic fillers.

Line Filters

Kinematics’ standard line filters are made of 10 micron, molded Porex® Polyethylene.
Filters finer than 10 micron are available on special order.