All 10 machines receive a sachet together and discharge onto Conveyor Out together, once every machine cycle — but Conveyor In, Conveyor Out and Buffer all still run continuously (no stop-start on the transport belts themselves). Only the Case Packer indexes intermittently, pocket by pocket. See Option 1 (companion file) for the staggered single-file version.
Conveyor In, Conveyor Out and Buffer are all plain constant-speed belts here too — nothing about them stops or indexes. What makes this "synchronized batch" is timing: sachets are pre-spaced on Conveyor In exactly one machine-width apart, so a fresh row of 10 arrives in register under every pusher at the same instant, is pushed in together, and — one machine cycle later — is discharged onto Conveyor Out together. The belts themselves never pause; only the case packer does.
This is the one speed that must be exact: it's what makes a sachet placed one machine-width behind its target arrive there exactly one cycle later, in register with every other machine's sachet at the same instant. Run it faster or slower and the synchronized pickup breaks down.
It's tempting to assume Conveyor Out can run as slow as Conveyor In's per-machine share, since each machine's sachets start out in their own lane, 760 mm apart. In practice, with 10 machines all feeding the same belt, that separation doesn't hold up: sooner or later two sachets from different machines' streams get close enough to trigger the belt's own minimum-spacing rule, and once that happens they stay linked, moving together at the belt's speed rather than drifting back apart. Run the simulation for a minute and you'll see Conveyor Out settle into pitch-spaced packing almost everywhere — so it needs to carry the full combined throughput, the same as Option 1's conveyor. The genuine speed advantage of this layout belongs to Conveyor In, which only has to deliver one machine-width of travel per cycle, not the whole merged flow.
The Buffer is still worth running faster than Conveyor Out — once sachets are packed at minimum pitch, a higher belt speed pulls them apart again, opening a gap between rows before they reach the case packer, so the hand-off there isn't fighting the same congestion.
Same logic as the companion file: the case packer loads one sachet, indexes one pocket forward, and can't accept the next one until that's done. If its speed is set below the combined throughput, sachets queue at its entrance regardless of which upstream feeding strategy delivered them — and if the queue fills the whole downstream pipe, the machines pause together (they're synchronized either way).
Once sachets reach the buffer, a stoppage packs them at minimum pitch regardless of how they arrived — so for the same hold-up target, this option needs the same buffer length as Option 1. What's different is everything upstream of the buffer: much slower, much lower-density conveyors, because throughput here comes from feeding 10 machines in parallel rather than merging into one fast single-file stream.
| Quantity | Value |
|---|---|
| Cycle time | |
| Required Conveyor In speed | |
| Minimum Conveyor Out speed | |
| Minimum case-packer speed to keep up | |
| Recommended buffer length (15 s) |