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'Scaling up' on vaccine filling

Now the world’s fourth largest supplier of poultry vaccines, Lohmann Animal Health maintains its ranking through capital investment. See in-plant video

A finished bottle with aluminum overcap and pressure-sensitive label is shown above.
A finished bottle with aluminum overcap and pressure-sensitive label is shown above.

A handful of mid-sized firms joined forces recently by way of merger and acquisition to form Lohmann Animal Health Intl., the world’s fourth largest poultry vaccine producer. Once the dust had settled, management at the Gainesville, GA, firm decided it was time to consolidate certain production and packaging operations at a plant in Waterville, ME. A necessary first step was the installation of packaging equipment capable of higher throughput.

“We needed to scale up,” says general manager Tom Swieczkowski. “We couldn’t get much past 4ꯠ of our 500-mL bottles per eight-hour shift with the equipment we used to have. Now we can do 10ꯠ.”

Familiarity with equipment made by Cozzoli (Plainfield, NJ) led Lohmann to that firm for the new line. “Not only were we comfortable with their equipment, they’re located near us and their service is great,” says Swieczkowski.

Three key machines

Lohmann invested about $1 million in the three key machines that make up its new packaging line: a filler, a stoppering machine, and an overcapper. The filler and capper are both enclosed in a separate room that’s HEPA-filtered to a Class 10ꯠ level.

Inside this filtered room, operators manually load HDPE bottles onto a rotary infeed table. The Cozzoli VR840 in-line piston filler is an intermittent-motion four-nozzle system that could quickly expand to eight valves, according to Swieczkowski. HDPE bottles conveyed into it are extrusion blown by Genesis Industries (Elmwood, WI) in 250-, 500-, and 625-mL sizes. The 500-mL bottle is most commonly in production, and Lohmann fills it at about 30/min.

Although the VR840 positive displacement piston filler has been available for years, the machine at Lohmann has been improved considerably with the addition of an Allen-Bradley SLC 503 programmable logic controller from Rockwell Automation (Milwaukee, WI). No longer does an operator change fill volume by going to the back of the machine, loosening a few screws, sliding an adjustment rod to a new setting, and retightening the screws. Instead, the operator accesses the machine’s pump stroke through an Allen-Bradley Panelview operator interface. As soon as the operator selects the percentage of pump capacity that’s desired, the PLC signals actuators to adjust the piston stroke accordingly.

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