Krones works with Turkish tea vendor to provide savings
By Canadian Packaging staff
Automation Bottling Contiform 3 blowmolder Dogus Cay tea and iced tea Krones AG Krones hotfill line NitroHotfillDogus Cay achieves high compressed-air savings thanks to NitroHotfill from Krones.
The Turkish tea vendor Dogus Cay produces around 35,000 tons of tea per year in five facilities in Rize plus a packaging plant in Ordu. The distinctive tasting black tea from the coasts of the Black sea is distributed all over Turkey. Now the company has also begun to produce high-quality ice tea (see image below) in consumer-friendly PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) containers.
For these ice tea products at its facility in Izmir/Ödemis, in 2015 Dogus Cay started up a NitroHotfill line from Krones AG, Neutraubling, Germany, rated at 22,500 containers per hour.
A Krones Contiform 3 blowmolder (an example seen above) at the facility produces 250-millilitre hotfill PET containers weighing just 15 grams on 10 molds at a record speed of 2,250 containers per hour and cavity.
One year after the installation, a Krones team conducted an on-site trial to improve the line’s compressed-air system.
Following an upgrade and a simple optimization job on the Contiform 3, tests revealed exceptionally good results: with the same excellent container quality, but with savings of 44 per cent more in compressed-air consumption when compared to results from before the upgrade—more than 300 Nm³/h.
Krones indicates that there may be even more savings, should larger containers be used by the tea manufacturer in the upcoming months.
The upgrade saves real money, around €40,000 (~CDN $58,000) a year, given a calculated machine running time of 6,000 hours per annum.
Attractive alternative to the conventional hotfill process
By developing the NitroHotfill option, Krones offers a financially-attractive alternative to the conventional hotfill process, with control at the Dogus Cay facility based on the relax-cooling (RC) process.
By installing a nitrogen injection dosage feature just upstream of the closer, the bottle is pressurized.
This positive bottle pressure compensates for the volumetric shrinkage of the product downstream of the cooling unit and accordingly prevents underpressure-related deformation of the bottle.
The panel design hitherto required to compensate for the vacuum pressure with hot-filled products can thus be dispensed with.
The process also enables aluminum molds to be used, and dramatically reduces the machine’s compressed-air consumption.
The NitroHotfill technology can be retrofitted to many Krones hotfill lines as well.
More information on Krones can be found at www.krones.com.
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