Resource-saving and flexible filling of sensitive products

The mar­ket for sen­si­tive bev­er­ages is flour­ish­ing. Through­out the world man­u­fac­tur­ers of dairy prod­ucts have rec­og­nized the poten­tial of whole­some bev­er­ages and expand­ed their prod­uct port­fo­lio over the past few years. Most of the new prod­ucts are filled into PET bot­tles. With its new lin­ear InnoPET BloFill ABF asep­tic block KHS is sat­is­fy­ing the require­ments of the dairy indus­try for flex­i­ble fill­ing tech­nol­o­gy for sen­si­tive prod­ucts. Fast for­mat changeovers and a mod­u­lar design are the ide­al solu­tion to the rapid changes in demand pro­duc­ers are now faced with.

Sen­si­tive bev­er­ages are becom­ing increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar all over the world. The demand for func­tion­al foods with less sug­ar in par­tic­u­lar is grow­ing. “Keep­ing to a healthy diet is play­ing a cen­tral role in the lives of more and more con­sumers,” explains Thomas Redek­er, sales direc­tor for Dairy Europe at the KHS Group. “The demand for prod­ucts that are sus­tain­ably pack­aged and attrac­tive­ly pre­sent­ed has also great­ly increased in the last few years.”

PET bot­tles are the ide­al vehi­cles for this new trend. An increas­ing num­ber of mak­ers of dairy prod­ucts are thus rely­ing on con­tain­ers made of poly­eth­yl­ene tereph­tha­late. “Not only pro­duc­ers but also con­sumers are con­vinced by their many dif­fer­ent advan­tages,” says Redek­er. In par­tic­u­lar this includes the great capac­i­ty for indi­vid­ual design this type of con­tain­er has. “PET bot­tles lend them­selves to exclu­sive design. The cap and label can also be per­fect­ly tai­lored to the brand. This had a pos­i­tive effect on the brand posi­tion­ing at the point of sale,” Redek­er states.

The plas­tic con­tain­ers also score when it comes to their envi­ron­men­tal bal­ance as they are ful­ly recy­clable. PET bot­tles not only pro­vide reli­able prod­uct pro­tec­tion; they also have good pour­ing properties.

KHS first rec­og­nized the poten­tial of PET con­tain­ers for asep­tic fill­ing 25 years ago. Its lat­est devel­op­ment is the lin­ear InnoPET BloFill ABF asep­tic block. This com­bines the rotary InnoPET Blo­max Series V stretch blow mold­er with the lin­ear Innosept Asbofill ABF 712 asep­tic filler.

The block yields many ben­e­fits. It not only takes up less space than the indi­vid­ual machines, for instance; the air con­vey­or is also no longer required. This cuts down on ener­gy con­sump­tion. Anoth­er advan­tage is that per­son­nel costs are reduced as only one oper­a­tor is need­ed in place of the for­mer two. “By block­ing the machin­ery and includ­ing a con­tin­u­ous clock mod­ule we also min­i­mize the risk of soil­ing. This has a pos­i­tive impact on hygiene and line avail­abil­i­ty,” smiles Redeker.

Fast for­mat changeovers with­in the space of up to ten min­utes also help to boost sys­tem avail­abil­i­ty. They are per­formed under asep­tic con­di­tions, doing away with the need for any addi­tion­al clean­ing and ster­il­iza­tion. The short changeover times also let pro­duc­ers of sen­si­tive bev­er­ages fill a large num­ber of dif­fer­ent stock-keep­ing units (SKUs) in a very short time indeed. The lin­ear asep­tic block is designed to fill milk, mixed milk bev­er­ages, juice, smooth­ies and iced tea into PET bot­tles hold­ing between 250 mil­li­liters and two liters. The equip­ment out­puts up to 12,000 1.0‑liter bot­tles and a max­i­mum of 15,000 0.5‑liter bot­tles per hour.

Bot­tlers also prof­it from the mod­u­lar design of the dry asep­tic block which allows the filler to be expand­ed at any time. Oper­a­tors can retro­fit their block with a chunk filler or addi­tion­al fill­ing and cap­ping unit, for instance. “The mod­u­lar design gives our cus­tomers greater flex­i­bil­i­ty. They don’t have to think about pre­cise­ly which prod­ucts they want to bot­tle when pur­chas­ing the block,” Redek­er says. “KHS enables them to retro­fit the required mod­ules on site as soon as they expand their prod­uct port­fo­lio.” This in turn per­mits bev­er­age pro­duc­ers to react more flex­i­bly to chang­ing mar­ket demands.

With the inte­gra­tion of the stretch blow mold­er the asep­tic block gains a num­ber of fur­ther plus points. One of these is that the heat­ing sys­tem in the new Blo­max gen­er­a­tion con­sumes up to 40% less ener­gy com­pared to most stan­dard heat­ing sys­tems thanks to its opti­mized near infrared heat­ing con­cept and new Dou­ble Gate tech­nol­o­gy. This is made pos­si­ble by the near infrared heater cen­tral­ly installed in the closed reflec­tor tun­nel. In the heater the pre­forms pass the cen­tral­ly arranged heat­ing units to both the left and right. The pre­forms are spaced just around 18 mil­lime­ters apart instead of the pre­vi­ous approx­i­mate­ly 37 mil­lime­ters. The Dort­mund sys­tems sup­pli­er has thus been able to con­sid­er­ably reduce the num­ber of heater box­es used. The air man­age­ment sys­tem for heater box ven­ti­la­tion has also been opti­mized. “The fan can be set sep­a­rate­ly for the neck, reflec­tor and lamps. This means that the machine only cools the areas which actu­al­ly need cool­ing,” explains Redeker.

When fur­ther devel­op­ing its lin­ear asep­tic filler KHS also focused on increased effi­cien­cy. The fill­ing machine for sen­si­tive prod­ucts is avail­able in both a stan­dard asep­tic and ESL ver­sion. In the KHS process ster­il­iza­tion takes place in sev­er­al stages. First, the machine dis­in­fects the neck and bot­tle inte­ri­or. Here, the inside of the con­tain­er is sprayed twice with a hydro­gen per­ox­ide aerosol (H₂O₂) at a speed of up to 80 kilo­me­ters an hour. “This ensures that every part of the bot­tle is sprayed and ster­il­ized; we even achieve this with indi­vid­ual designs and crit­i­cal shapes,” Redek­er states. Sec­ond­ly, two aerosol reac­tion cycles are ini­ti­at­ed. The process ends with a four-stage dry­ing process which uses ster­ile hot air.

In order to ensure the qual­i­ty of the prod­ucts, it is essen­tial that the asep­tic zone is absolute­ly clean. KHS ensures this by gen­tle non-con­tact fill­ing, among oth­er things, per­formed in two stages. This pre­vents any exces­sive bev­er­age foaming.

After fill­ing the bot­tle is con­veyed to the cap­ping unit. Here, the clo­sure is ster­il­ized in the same man­ner as the bot­tle in the fill­ing sec­tion. This entails two-step dis­in­fec­tion with H₂O₂ and two dry­ing stages with hot ster­ile air. “In the cap­per unit we’ve also made sure that all parts in the asep­tic zone have a flat sur­face. By doing so we can pre­vent any air tur­bu­lence, mak­ing clean­ing and dis­in­fec­tion eas­i­er,” Redek­er com­ments. The bot­tle is then dat­ed for full doc­u­men­ta­tion of all infor­ma­tion. “Our cus­tomers can always see which prod­uct was filled when on which valve,” explains Redeker.

With its new dry asep­tic block KHS has react­ed to the cur­rent dairy demand for flex­i­ble, resource-sav­ing fill­ing of sen­si­tive prod­ucts. The new sys­tem also boosts line avail­abil­i­ty and con­sid­er­ably reduces ener­gy con­sump­tion. Oper­a­tors also have greater flex­i­bil­i­ty thanks to the short changeover times: for­mat changes are facil­i­tat­ed by the well-coor­di­nat­ed inter­faces. The mod­u­lar design also enables cus­tomers to expand their lin­ear asep­tic filler block in order to meet cur­rent mar­ket demands at all times.