Soft Drink Bottling Plant
Detailed planning required for comprehensive plant overhaul
Bottling Plants
What was required:
A soft drink bottling plant, and subsidiary of Foodstuffs, was being relocated. The new site meant the 20-year-old plant machinery needed upgrading and was equipped with the latest automation technologies. The objective was to have a bottling plant that required minimal human interaction.
Fitzwilliam Electrical commissioned, integrated and installed the new bottling plant and controls, including the actions of the water bore pump situated 400 metres away.
What we did:
This two-year project required lots of detailed planning and layered communications. The installation included 20 conveyor systems and various fully automatic machines at different stages of the production process.
Fitzwilliam Electrical used the latest Rockwell 5380 processor for the machine's integration. Networked it throughout the plant and connected it to the water bore pump via fibre optic cable.
- Water is sent to holding tanks in preparation for processing and automated chemical dosing and UV filtration system begins automatically.
- The clean water is sent to the carbonator where it's mixed with chilled water through a heat exchanger and syrups are mixed in.
- The carbonated, flavoured water is then sent to the 40-head rinser, filler and capper machine. Bottles are turned upside down automatically and a counter-pressure filler puts the product in the bottle and caps it.
- Bottles then get sent on a conveyor to a bi-directional table where it stores a collection of products in anticipation of the labelling machine.
- At the packing stage, two new machines were installed and integrated - one a semi-automatic case-over packer and the other a fully automatic SMI case packer.
- A robotic palletiser then stacks the cased product onto a pallet and wraps it. Accurate servo motors drive the palletiser which has been programmed in Robot World software.
- Also, a CIP or Cleaning In Place automation was included which would clean equipment between batches of product.
Safety controls throughout the automation process are category three.
How it helped:
The comprehensive design and install automation project was a huge success. Catapulting production into the 21st century and making for a better and safer production process.
Production is now a touch of a button selection of pre-programmed recipes. The whole bottling process only requires eight human operators to run seamlessly. The company was thrilled with the solution and blown away by its automated capabilities.
