Small-footprint bottle accumulation/conveying

Innovative loop conveyor with integrated single-filer requires minimum floor space and eliminates back pressure.

Pw 6242 Premium Water Garvey A

Private-label bottled water supplier Premium Waters, Inc., Douglas, GA, wanted to install some new high-speed PET bottle handling capacity (700 bpm +) to accommodate 20-oz and 500-mL filled water bottles at its brand new facility.

Typically, a production line for this type of application incorporates slow-down lanes after the filler/capper to mass the bottles. The bottles then accumulate on a mass conveyor or travel onto a bidirectional table to be accumulated. From the accumulation station, the filled/capped bottles then travel through a pressureless combiner that single-files the bottles to a labeler. After labeling, the bottles again are single-filed and massed together for feeding to the case-packing operations.

This type of system has a lot of back pressure associated with it and requires some major controls to operate. In addition, it takes up significant plant floor space and offers increased potential for bottle damage.

Better accumulator option

With the help of independent consultant Mike Hitchcock, M.H. Consulting, Inc. (847/606-1059), Premium Waters discovered the Infinity accumulator manufactured by Garvey Corp. (www.garvey.com). Hitchcock, who provides engineering and project management services to the food and beverage industries and has been working with Premium Waters since 2001, had seen Garvey’s advertisement on the Infinity accumulator. It described how the system can handle PET bottles at high speeds without any back pressure. And by using an innovative loop conveyor system with an integrated single-filer, the accumulator also helps to create harmony among various machines of different rates and feed configurations on the packaging line.

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