In high speed packaging and production environments, it's often very desirable to rotate a product while it's traveling on the conveyor belt and present it in the correct manner to the next operation on a production line.
This can be because a labeler or marking machine needs to have the product presented in a certain direction, or maybe a robot wants to pick up the product and it therefore must be presented in a certain orientation.
It's possible to "Nudge" the product while on the conveyor so that it's persuaded to rotate by direct contact, but this often involves more than one "Nudge" over often a distance of conveyor belt length that you may not always be able to afford.
There is also the risk that with this method the final orientation of the product can still be unreliable and the product can be marked or damaged.
The application pictured was one such application where a 90° turn needed to take place in a very short time.
The solution was to have 2 modular belted conveyor belts running at different speeds adjacent to each other. This difference in speed rotates the product.
Seems like a sledge hammer to crack a nut? well, the advantage here is that by fine tuning the belt speeds, the distance taken to rotate the product, the amount of rotation needed and the facility to cater for different products are all covered by speed modes for each product that can be switched when the product changes, or adjusted when the rotational demands change.
See more conveyor belt details at http://www.asconveyorsystems.co.uk