Conveyors and buffers on beverage filling lines

摘要

The duration of a disruption caused by individual machines on a bottling line depends upon a number of factors, e.g. thecontainers (bottles/cans) to be filled, the personnel operating the filling line, the filling sequence, the volume to be filled, the condition of the filling line, the age of the equipment and the operating conditions. Equipment manufacturers attempt to employ suitable buffers between the individual pieces of equipment in order to absorb disruptions and to ensure uninterrupted operation. The recommended period of time containers should be allowed to accumulate in buffer ranges from 120 to 180 seconds. How often and to what extent equipment causes disruptions not only varies from filling line to filling line but is also dependent upon numerous factors. Stop-and-go operation of the core machine increases the propensity for disruption and should be avoided under all circumstances. A buffer may not be able to accommodate an increase in the disruption of individual machines, causing the overall efficiency to deteriorate by a few percentage points. Approaches for optimizing buffer design can be developed by analyzing the data obtained from the filling line. Applicable models already exist and simply require that the relevant data be carefully interpreted.