Topjet by Waterjet Corp. doubles line productivity

For over thirty years, Marmo Arredo S.p.A. has been a leader in the treatment of marble, granite, natural stone, composite materials and agglomerates intended for construction and furnishing.
The production, starting from the selection of the material right through to the finished product, has always stood out for the ability to integrate the craftsmanship of manual processing with the use of the most advanced CNC machines. Marmo Arredo is among the Italian and European leaders in the production of marble, granite and quartz agglomerate kitchen tops: the impeccable quality of the finished product goes hand in hand with the ultra speedy responsiveness of the company thanks to the automated production lines that allow the processing times to be reduced.

This context of process automation includes the installation inside the facility in the province of Padua of the brand new Topjet: the automatic jet water cutting line dedicated to the creation of kitchen tops, which have always been the core business of the company.

The line, which can process slabs of up to a maximum of 1200×3200 mm, consists of 4 main production stations:

• Loading area with barcode coding
• Jet water cutting area with automatic slab sliding and lifting system for its positioning. The cutting station is equipped with an automatic unloading device of waste by means of a suction cup
• Slab washing and drying area
• Finished slab unloading area

The innovative capacity of the line lies in the automation of the slab loading/unloading phases: the slab is automatically loaded and positioned thanks to a barcode reading device that recognises and identifies the slab, loads a preset cutting program which primarily actuates the slab lifting system from the worktop and positions it by means of the two guides, one fixed and the other movable. Once perfectly positioned, the system lowers, once again, to bring the slab back to the area where the cut will take place, the parameters of which have already been loaded into the CNC while the bar code was read. Once the cut is completed, the second head mounted on
the bridge, fitted with suction cups, removes the processing waste from the worktop: at this point the slab is raised again to move on to the subsequent washing, drying and unloading phases and to exit, ready for packaging.

An operator would take several minutes to load and place a slab manually: thanks to this automation, the complete production cycle has been reduced to four minutes. With TopJet technology, Marmo Arredo has doubled the productivity of kitchen tops, producing 1200 pieces a day.

Massimo Russo, CEO of Waterjet, personally followed the sale: “Marmo Arredo is a long-standing client: there are three Waterjet machines inside their facility. It’s in our DNA to provide innovative solu- tions aimed at improving the per- formance of our customers. This is why, we have designed and manu- factured TopJet, a machine speci- fically dedicated to the production of kitchen tops that allows for a si- gnificant reduction in production times by integrating the automa- tion of the loading and unloading process, as well as ensuring very high processing precision”.