View news and innovations from PACK EXPO 2024
View all the latest news and innovations from PACK EXPO International 2024

Three legs are better than one

Glass bottles of Rolling Rock beer run through paired fillers at 1길/min and then fan out to any one of three packaging legs. Eight operators ‘patrol’ the entire line. See in-plant video

Pw 16927 Bottle

A three-legged secondary-packaging system has brought Latrobe Brewing Co. of Latrobe, PA, to the head of the class where high-speed automation and Just-In-Time manufacturing are concerned. With two 108-valve fillers feeding 12-oz glass bottles to three secondary packaging legs, the line is designed to handle 1길 bottles/min with just eight operators assisting. The $14.5 million line replaces a system that ran half as fast and required twice as many operators.

“We haven’t installed a new line in 20 years,” says Bill Allison, packaging manager at the brewery. “So this was quite a step for our people, considering how much technology has changed. It really represents a shift in staffing philosophies, so that instead of having people feel like they’re assigned to a specific packaging machine, we have people responsible for specific areas that they patrol.”

The line was sold and installed by the Beverage Division of Italy’s Sasib S.p.A as a turnkey project, including engineering and project management. The SIG Group of Switzerland recently acquired Sasib’s Beverage Division, which is now called SIG-Simonazzi (Plano, TX).

The sophisticated equipment used to carry packaging materials into the line is a story in itself (see p. 44). But the heart of the line is a pair of 108-valve Eurotronica fillers from SIG (see video). Flanking each filler are a 108-head rinser and a rotary crowner, also from SIG.

On the Eurotronica filler, each electronically controlled valve has its own microprocessor, which receives signals from a PLC. These signals govern the valve’s opening and closing operations according to a preset sequence. A level probe measures fill height, and that information is relayed via the valve’s microprocessor to the PLC, which stores the information.

Because each filling sequence is electronically logged in this way, any individual valve that malfunctions will be quickly detected. If, for example, valve 47 is underfilling each time, an operator can reprogram that valve through the computer control system to stay open, say, one-tenth of a second longer. Later, during scheduled maintenance, the valve can be examined, but in the meantime its filling accuracy can be restored on the fly.

Ink-jet coding

Also applied to each bottle, just before each rinser, is “born on” dating. It’s done by a Videojet ink-jet coder from Marconi Data Systems (Wood Dale, IL).

As bottles leave the crowner, they’re conveyed through a RetroVision machine vision system from Industrial Dynamics (Torrance, CA) that detects improperly seated crowns. A few feet later, fill height is inspected by an Industrial Dynamics Filtec system.

Following these inspections, bottles are combined in a mass flow and then split again so they can be sent through an energy-efficient double-deck pasteurizer from SIG-Simonazzi’s Pama Div. Allison says the pasteurizer uses about 13 gal of water/min and consumes steam at a rate of less than 1ꯠ lb/hr when bottles are running at 1길/min. Latrobe’s previous line, he adds, required 120 gal of water/min and 4ꯠ lb of steam/hr for bottles running at 800/min.

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New e-book on Multipacking and Case Packing