Read More on:
Send to KindleDelivering for dairy
Bottles are conveyed through a feedscrew that times their release into an infeed starwheel that transfers them into the FG-185 monobloc filling and capping station from Fogg Filler (Holland MI). The starwheel delivers bottles onto lift pedestals on the 18-valve rotary filling turret.
Once filled bottles are conveyed through a transfer starwheel that delivers them to a five-station rotary roll-snap capper. The Fogg capper applies the caps as bottles ascend on a cam. Capped bottles descend and are discharged through a starwheel. Then an ink-jet coder prints a code onto the cap. The coder from Diagraph (St. Louis MO) provides an 18-day code from date of manufacture.
Labeling
Coded bottles are conveyed downstream through an area described as an “air knife” by Kloster. The air knife includes two tubes one mounted along each side of the conveyor. Each tube is about 5’ long. As bottles are conveyed between the tubes air is blown from the tubes toward the bottles.
This removes condensation that forms on bottle surfaces when bottles filled at temperatures below 40°F come in contact with the warmer room air. By removing condensation shrink-sleeve labels adhere properly to the bottle.
Bottles pass the air knife station and proceed through a paddle wheel device that spaces them properly for downstream sleeve-label application. The extra space between bottles is important because the label dropped onto the bottle is wider than the bottle. If bottles were placed too closely the labels could interfere with the process. The paddle wheel device as well as the EZ-2-200 dual-head label application system is supplied by Axon (Raleigh NC).
Each head uses a roll of film that’s preprinted folded and sealed into a tube. The flat film tube opens around a mandrel then is delivered downward toward the conveyor below that carries the bottles.
A knife cuts the material and the open sleeve label drops over the bottle. The bottle then passes two preshrinking devices one on each side of the conveyor. Also made by Axon the devices direct hot air along a narrow band at the base of the container. This shrinks the label in place as it enters an Axon EZ-72-SS shrink tunnel that uses steam to shrink the full-body label into place on the bottle.
“My understanding is that steam does a better overall job of shrinking than hot air” says Kloster. “The problem with hot air is that it doesn’t surround the bottle well enough to deliver a good consistent shrink of the label.”
Downstream duo
Shrink-labeled bottles are conveyed through a wall opening to a Model 90 Spot-Pak® bottle packaging system from Delkor Systems (Minneapolis MN). The machine uses a cross-push arm to push bottles toward a staging area. It does so in three rows of four bottles.
The 12 bottles are held in place by a metal stop gate. Once the 12 are assembled the gate opens releasing the bottle group into a pickup area where a vacuum head lifts them up a few inches.
A pick-and-place module positioned at a right angle to the pickup area pushes a corrugated pad along a conveyor into the pickup area. Just before the pad reaches this area nozzles deliver three strips of removable hot melt adhesive to the pad. The pad is pushed into the pickup area before the pneumatic-powered head lowers the bottles onto the pad.
The hot melt temporarily holds bottles in place on the pad as they’re conveyed a few feet to a Delkor Model 112 wrapper and heat tunnel. The pack is pushed into a 2-mil low-density polyethylene film curtain that envelops the bottles and then seals and cuts the film. The film-bundled pack is then sent into the shrink tunnel. The multipacks are palletized by hand and pallet loads are shipped to Oberweis stores or to retail customers.
Based on the initial success of the dairy’s single-serve bottles Oberweis’s investment of more than $1 million for the new filling line is beginning to reap dividends.
See sidebar to this article: Custom bottle helps launch Oberweis Dairy into single-serve milks
Comments(0)
Add new comment